Chapter 6
Unpacked Suitcases
1.
When they met, one of the things she liked about him right away was that he let her finish her own sentences, even if she had to pause for a second or two to find the right words. She had worked with other directors who talked for or over her, putting words in her mouth, trying to convince her that she felt or wanted something that she didn’t. She hadn’t completed her senior year of college, and three years later she remained self-conscious about this omission, despite her successes in the “real world,” which was supposed to be where success counted most. Twelve credits stood between her and her diploma because she had permitted her acting career to preempt other responsibilities, but no one she knew considered this a foolish choice, except maybe her parents. If her decision to leave school hadn’t turned out so well, she could always have returned to Austin to finish her degree—if she didn’t get herself pregnant or become a drug addict or shack up with some deadbeat boyfriend who made her sell T-shirts (or herself) on Venice Beach—which were the sorts of things that she suspected her parents had initially feared.
Another thing about Renn that Elise had liked immediately was that he hadn’t tried too hard to impress her, not in the way she had become accustomed to men and boys doing over the past five or six years, ever since, as her sister Belle, three years older and ironically, much plainer, had declared, Elise had become “aggressively beautiful.” There were, she had to admit, few shortages or deficits in her life, except maybe for free time and privacy, a fact that, she had a feeling, would wear on her more in the future than it did right now. Her fame was still a novelty to her, and on some mornings she awoke and felt, unaccountably, like laughing: the knowledge that she had made it as an actress, that her fame and sudden affluence were not a mirage, dawning on her with the same pleasurable warmth that she felt when newly in love.
They had been filming in New Orleans for a little over two weeks when she and Renn became lovers. She had never before gone to bed with a man more than a couple of years her senior. She also hadn’t gone to bed with nearly as many men as some of her friends had either, despite the number of willing and sometimes pushy suitors she encountered. It was occasionally difficult to deflect with grace the passes a few of her admirers made, but she understood that she shouldn’t complain. If no one were coming on to her, she would likely miss the attention and wonder if something was wrong with her. Her mother had also set her straight on this topic, her words spoken softly but tinged with what sounded to Elise like scorn: “If you plan to be a movie star, you’d better be able to live with the good and bad attention you’re asking for. Just do your father and me a favor and don’t accept any roles that require you to take off your clothes. That way you’ll have fewer perverts stalking you.”
Perverts. The word had always sounded comical to Elise, even more so when her mother said it, because it was not the kind of word she was in the habit of using. Her mother spoke with a pronounced southern accent, being a native Texan, but her father did not because he had been raised in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. (Elise had been told that she also spoke with a twang, but it was not as obvious as her mother’s. Still, it needed to be effaced for most of the roles she would play, if not all.) Mrs. Connor used words like critter and britches as naturally as a character out of a John Wayne movie. When Elise told Renn about some of the southern peculiarities in her mother’s speech, he had laughed. “Does she say it as in ‘too big for your britches’?” he asked.
Elise smiled. “She sure does. What else? Too tiny for your britches? Too pretty?”
“I bet she said that about me, if you told her about us.”
“You are too big for your britches. And too pretty,” she said, looking down the length of his unclothed body, one that had surprised her by being more muscular than she had expected. He was almost thirty years older than she was, and although he looked good in his clothes, she hadn’t been sure what would be lurking beneath them. They were in his room at the Omni Hotel; it was their second week together, and she was thinking that she might be falling in love with him. She wasn’t sure what he felt for her though, aside from lust, and it made her nervous. Was he considering their relationship a fling, destined to end as soon as they wrapped Bourbon at Dusk? He had talked about introducing her to his friends, and to his son and daughter (both older than she was), but maybe he had no intention of doing so. The age difference should have made her feel as if she had the sexual edge, but she felt as if the opposite were true—he might think her too immature and unworldly and already be very close to tiring of her.
“You don’t have to say that,” he said quietly, but his smile was so sincere and uncomplicated that she could see how much he liked hearing it. He was as keen for flattery as any of the other men (eight? or maybe it was nine—why was it that she couldn’t recall exactly?) she had been with by then.
“I know I don’t.”
“If you keep giving me compliments like that, I might have to marry you.” He laughed but then abruptly stopped smiling.
She couldn’t tell if he was serious. He’s an actor, she reminded herself. I really have to make a point of remembering this.
“We’ll have to see about that,” she said, burying her face in his neck, breathing in the scent of the lemony soap he had used in the shower before she had come to his room.
“I want a small wedding to go with my big cock,” he said solemnly.
She shrieked and pulled back, thrilled by his crudeness.
“It has to be small,” he said. “Otherwise my cock will get jealous if it’s not the biggest thing in the room.”
“You’re terrible,” she said, laughing.
“Yes, I am, so you’d better get used to it.” He squeezed her sides until she shrieked again.
“Shhh,” he said. “What will the neighbors think?”
2.
To Elise’s and everyone else’s minor amazement, Renn and his assistant director were able to stay on the production schedule for Bourbon that they had devised with their producers, but inevitably, at the end of the fourth week, events began to conspire against them. Renn’s personal assistant had to take a leave of absence due to a family emergency, and the cinematographer contracted a virulent strain of food poisoning from a plate of crawfish that laid him up for three days. On top of that, the costume designer’s assistant quit because his boyfriend broke up with him over the phone, and two hours later he had fled home to Long Beach in tears to try to convince the boyfriend to change his mind. There were twenty-four days left on the schedule and about forty-five more pages of the script left to shoot, and if any retakes were necessary, they would have to be done before the company left New Orleans. Building sets on a soundstage in L.A. would be prohibitively expensive, and Renn intended for everything to be shot on location anyway. This was very important, in his view, to maintaining the authentic atmosphere of the picture.
When he told Elise that he had asked his son, Billy, to fly in from L.A. and work as his personal assistant for the remaining weeks of the production, she had hidden her curiosity from Renn. Since moving to California, she had interacted with enough men around his age who pretended to an amiable camaraderie with some of the younger men they worked with, but on at least two occasions, she had sensed an undercurrent of vicious competition between the older and younger man, in one case, a father and son. She had been a psychology major at UT-Austin, and even before college had believed that her hunches about people were often correct. Most of the time, even among the wealthy and powerful people she now interacted with each day, little happened to prove her impressions too far off.
Billy arrived on Bourbon’s set on a windless, thickly humid Thursday afternoon. He was visibly exhausted, unsure of himself, very cute. She could tell that he was surprised and flattered when she told him that he looked a lot like his father. After the introductions, Renn was anxious to get the next shot under way and hadn’t kept Billy on the set long enough to have a real conversation with her or anyone else. She later learned that Renn had given Billy a time-consuming PR task (which Billy promptly forgot about, and hearing this later, she felt sorry for him, considering how tired he looked) and an off-site errand for him to do with George’s assistance, Renn’s driver, a taciturn, slow-to-smile man who gave Elise the creeps, but Renn had told her that he trusted George more than anyone else he had worked with over the past twenty years.
It wasn’t until a couple of days later that she and Billy had a chance to talk for more than a few seconds. Renn was conferring with her costar, Marek Gilson, about a crucial solo scene, and the crew was setting up the next shot. The heat was still oppressive, and she was resting in her trailer and thinking about returning a call from her sister, but she wasn’t looking forward to doing it because she thought that Belle wanted money but would not be able to ask for it directly, something that drove Elise crazy. Through the window she saw Billy walking by and got up to open the door and call out to him. In the glimpse she caught of his face before he could rearrange his features into nonchalance, she thought she spotted nervous excitement, and possibly joy. Her heart sped up a little, responding to his flattering happiness.
“Come in and put your feet up for a minute,” she said. “You can help me go over the lines for my next scene.” She had already memorized them but thought he might refuse, fearing his father’s wrath, if she didn’t have a good reason to invite him in.
He hesitated, smiling up at her. “Are you sure? I don’t want to bother you.”
“Don’t be silly. You wouldn’t be bothering me at all. But are you in a hurry?”
He shook his head and ascended the three metal stairs that led to her trailer’s door. She debated for a second about leaving the door open, not wanting to fuel any rumors that she was having an affair with both the father and the son, but the thought emboldened and irritated her. She shut the door, almost slamming it. If she wanted to have a conversation with the director’s son, innocent or otherwise, that was her business. They were adults, for Christ’s sake. “Yes, sweetheart, but people know you now, a lot of people, and they’re going to be watching you,” she could hear her mother querulously counseling her.
After Billy had come inside and sat down, she looked at him intently and said, “You really do look a lot like your dad. I hope you don’t mind me saying that.”
He shook his head. He was perspiring, the underarms of his green Lacoste shirt darkened by sweat, his hair dampened too. “I know you mean it as a compliment. I could do worse than look like my dad.”
“That’s for sure.” She paused. “Do you want some water? I have some in the fridge.”
“That’d be great,” he said, his eyes flitting to her face before he glanced at the window.
“You’re sure I’m not keeping you from something? I don’t want to make your boss mad.”
Billy opened the water bottle and took a drink. He started coughing almost immediately, his face reddening as his eyes filled with tears. “Oh God,” he choked out. “How embarrassing.”
“Keep coughing,” she said. “That’s the only way you’ll get the water out of the wrong pipe.”
When the fit ended, he had tears running down his cheeks and his face was a furious red. Handing him a tissue, she felt a rush of tenderness for him, something almost maternal. Here’s a guy, she thought, who needs to be looked after. “Do you have a girlfriend?” she asked, his weakness giving her courage.
He blinked, surprised. “Yes, I guess I do.”
She smiled. “You guess?”
“Yes, I do. Sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”
“What’s her name?”
“Danielle.”
“I hope she appreciates you,” she said, earnest.
He nodded slowly. “She says she wants to move in with me.”
Elise regarded him, intrigued. “Do you want her to?”
“I think so, but I’m not sure.”
“Do you have a picture of her?” she asked, suppressing a sudden urge to wink, something she never did, except at small, shy children.
He hesitated before taking his phone from his back pocket, and after a few seconds of pressing and repressing two or three buttons he found a picture and handed her the phone. The display showed a startlingly pretty redhead in a black tank top, Billy in a Dodgers hat looking handsome and proud and suntanned next to her, his arm around his girlfriend’s pale, gleaming shoulders. “That was taken a few months ago,” he said, blushing. “We were in San Francisco for her birthday.”
“She’s so gorgeous,” said Elise, feeling a tremor of jealousy in spite of herself. Didn’t she have her hands full enough with Renn? Yet it was terribly fun to flirt with Billy, and she savored this perilous impulse, as if on a dare she were thrusting her finger through a flame. “She looks very sweet too. I can see why you’re with her.”
“She is sweet. Most of the time, anyway.” He paused, putting the phone back in his pocket. “What’s it like working with Marek Gilson?”
She reached for his water bottle and took a drink. “He’s very good,” she said. “His heart really seems to be in it, but I think everyone in the cast is crazy about this film.” She liked Marek well enough but wasn’t nuts about his recreational name-dropping, which seemed a little absurd to her because he had already made it, and in her opinion he had little to prove, though there was also the chance that he was trying to remind her of her place, making it clear that he knew more people than she did, that he was the film’s real star whereas she was still at the stage where she needed to prove her worth. Before she had started acting, she had always assumed that male and female actors did not feel competitive with each other, that there was only same-sex rivalry, if there had to be any rivalry at all. Now she realized how naive this assumption had been.
“My dad loves this film. His screenplay is really good.”
“You should tell him that,” she said.
Billy looked at her. “Why do you say that?”
“I don’t know. I just think he’d be happy to hear it. I would be.”
“I think I already told him that I liked it.”
There was something unstudied about him that she liked, something softer and less demanding than the swagger or smugness of the grown children of the other seasoned movie people she knew. She wondered if it was his mother’s influence, or else Renn had tried not to spoil his son and daughter too much. Elise was a little afraid to meet his daughter, whose med-school pedigree intimidated her.
“It’s so hot today,” she said, lifting her hair off her sweaty neck. He nodded, then looked away.
“I’d better go,” he said.
“Really? Already?”
“Yes, I’d better,” he said. He didn’t say good-bye but gave her a small wave before he opened the door to her trailer and disappeared. He hadn’t taken his bottle of water, which she noticed was still in her hand.
That night, after a bubble bath and a room-service dinner in Renn’s room, she discovered that the rumor mill was as robust on the Bourbon set as anywhere else. “I told Billy not to bother you,” he said. “Especially when you’re resting.”
“He wasn’t bothering me. I invited him up. I wanted him to tell me all your secrets.”
“I don’t think he knows them.”
She laughed. “Really? He must know a few.”
“Not if I can help it,” said Renn.
She couldn’t tell if he was being ironic. Her amateur powers of psychoanalysis seemed to be eroding under his influence. She said nothing.
“Why did you invite him into your trailer?”
Well, she thought, suppressing a smile. He’s jealous.
“I wanted him to help me go over some lines for my next scene.” She wasn’t sure why she persisted with this lie.
“You shouldn’t have left your assistant back in California, Elise. She might have come in handy here.” He smiled as he said this, but she could tell that he was annoyed.
“I feel more comfortable being on my own than having Gwynn with me all the time. I don’t really like being someone’s boss.”
“All right, but you can always ask one of the production assistants here to help you. Or I’ll do it if I’m not busy.”
She laughed. “You’re always busy.”
“I suppose that’s true.”
She hoped that she hadn’t gotten Billy into trouble. The PR task, at least, had been straightened out to Renn’s satisfaction, and Bourbon was likely to receive as much prerelease buzz as he hoped for, maybe more. The first movie he had directed, The Zoologist, had done very well critically, and although the box office receipts were modest, it had still earned a little more than expected. She had watched it before she auditioned for Bourbon at Dusk; some of it had been over her head, and there wasn’t a lot of dialogue, but she had been able to tell Renn that she had loved how he had progressively softened the light on the female lead, one of only five characters in the film with a speaking role. By the end, she was almost out of focus, something that had reminded Elise of how Laura had been portrayed in a film version of The Glass Menagerie that she had seen in high school. Renn had been impressed, telling her that Tennessee Williams was his favorite playwright. She didn’t know if she had a favorite playwright, but she told Renn that he was hers too.
“Billy was a perfect gentleman,” she said.
“I’m pretty sure that I can trust him,” said Renn, giving her a foxy smile. “But the jury’s still out on you.”
3.
There was a moment a week later when Elise thought that Billy might kiss her. They were alone in the elevator at the Omni, riding up to their rooms, and she was telling him a silly story about how her childhood pets had all been named after flowers, even the males. At the end of the story, the elevator doors about to open, he gave her a look that she recognized as the kind that sometimes accompanied a romantic confession: “I’d really like to make love to you right now,” or “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.” It wasn’t that these words had ever been spoken to her in this situation, not exactly, but she had heard them in movies and had always hoped that she would someday find herself in an elevator or on a rainy boardwalk with a handsome man who would reveal that he wanted to kiss her and then he would do it. It would feel right too, and they would somehow make it to the nearest bed without much difficulty, and maybe, a year or two later, she would marry him. (They would also be millionaires but not really have to work, and aside from two perfect children, she would rarely desire anything else.)
After she and Billy had stepped off the elevator and were standing uncertainly in front of the closing doors, he didn’t kiss her, but he touched her arm and said something that she knew she would remember for a long time. It was a confession, a startling one that she would keep to herself until she started seeing a therapist several months later who suggested that she ask herself if maybe it was the son she really wanted, not the father. The therapist would also say that Elise was probably not ready to commit to anyone for the long term and might not be ready to do so for several years.
“If it weren’t for my dad,” Billy said quietly, “I’d be doing everything I could to convince you to go out with me.”
She didn’t know what to say, but when she opened her mouth to speak, he held up his hand. “Please forget I said that,” he said, blushing. “I never say things like that.”
“I’m very flattered,” she said softly.
“You are?”
“Of course I am, Billy.”
We faltered, his smile apologetic. “Would you mind calling me Will?”
“Oh,” she said, embarrassed. “Sure. I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s fine. I just prefer Will.” He pulled a folded piece of yellow paper from the back pocket of his shorts and handed it to her. “This is for you. I hope you won’t show it to anyone.”
She stared at him. “What is it?”
“It’s something I wrote last night. I’m not a writer, so it’s not very good.”
She could feel her stomach leap. “Hey,” she said. “You should never apologize for a gift. That’s something my grandfather taught me. He’d even refuse a gift if someone apologized for it. My grandmother hated it when he did this, but people stopped apologizing, or else maybe they just bought him better presents.” Her cell phone started to ring then, the ringtone the one she had assigned to Renn, but she didn’t reach into her purse to answer it.
“You’d better get that. I’ll see you later,” said Billy.
“Billy. Will, I mean. Wait.”
He looked at her.
She held up the note. “Thank you.”
He nodded, then turned and left her with the paper gripped in her damp fingers. Her room was in the opposite direction, around the corner and at the far end of the hall, only three doors down from Renn, something she wondered if he had requested when their hotel rooms had been reserved. She couldn’t wait to read Will’s note, but when she was slipping her key card into her door, Renn opened his door and she hastily stashed the note in her purse, annoyed but not showing it. He was wearing his robe and a smile, the robe meaning that he wanted to have sex before dinner. After dinner, if there was no night shoot scheduled, his habit was to watch the dailies. If they waited until after the dailies to have sex, he was sometimes too tired, or else he didn’t last long and she would have to finish for herself. But when he was awake and had the energy, he was the best lover she had ever had.
4.
Six days later, Will went back to L.A. He left without saying goodbye, and although she had a pretty good idea why he left the set early, she was surprised that he hadn’t tried to speak to her one more time before going home. She didn’t have his phone number, and she wasn’t sure where he lived, only that his place was close to the Getty. The night he gave her the note, she hadn’t been able to read it until almost midnight; Renn had asked her to watch the dailies with him, and she said yes because he didn’t always ask. Taking her clothes off and slipping into bed with him before dinner, she was reminded that he was the most exciting man she had met in a long time, much more exciting than the French teacher she had had a crush on during her junior year at UT-Austin, a young professor whom all the female students and a few of the male students had been smitten with because he was from Paris and not yet thirty, but most of all because he resembled Olivier Martinez, the sexiest film star anywhere, aside from Renn maybe, that Elise could think of. As if she had scripted it, M. Tanguy became her lover a few weeks after the semester ended. She had run into him at the grocery store, where he was buying mangoes and Camembert. He had chuckled over the cliché: “I love French cheese,” he said, grinning adorably. “It is true that you cannot take the France out of the Frenchman.” That he had not spoken in French made her wonder if he was nervous seeing her too. Without directly meeting her eyes, he had asked her to share the cheese with him, and they dated until early August, when he went home to Paris for three weeks. After his return, he told Elise that he had gotten back together with an old girlfriend and that he could not keeping seeing her. Now, from time to time, she wondered if he had seen any of her movies, if he regretted breaking up with her so unceremoniously. It had taken her all of the fall term to get over him, even after she had been flown to Hollywood and had auditioned for a role in a Vince Vaughn comedy that subsequently she was chosen for, and from then on, her life was very different.
Will’s note was half poem, half love letter; it made her smile until her cheeks hurt, her eyes tearing up, in part because she had a feeling that she would have gone down the hall to thank him, and maybe also to kiss him, if she hadn’t already been involved with his father, who was asleep on the other side of the locked bathroom door.
Dear Elise,
I’m not sure if I’ll give you this. It seems
too much of a risk, for so many reasons.
I think of you
as a woman
who must receive notes like this one
almost every day.
Still,
I cannot keep
these thoughts to myself anymore.
When I close my eyes
I see you
as spun from gold and silk
and a dove’s soft wings.
I can only guess what it is like
to touch you—
you would be softer than warm rain
falling
from a midnight sky.
Yours would be the one
breath to bring me back to life
if I were trapped
in a room with no windows,
the light fading outside,
the walls too close. It is impossible
for me to stop thinking about you.
—New Orleans, October 26
At first, she did not want to recover from the feeling the poem gave her. It was as if she were lying on her back, floating in the Pacific, nothing at all on her calendar for the next few weeks. This never happened anymore, both the blissful beach-going and the open schedule.
When she climbed into Renn’s bed after reading the poem several times, she could feel Will’s presence down the hall. She imagined him lying in his bed too, wondering if she had liked his note, if she might also have a crush on him. She didn’t know if she did, but his poem affected her more than any other gift had in a while, even the elegant platinum bracelet Renn had given her two days earlier. He had had it sent overnight from Tiffany’s, a detail he had only shared with her after she had pried it out of him. As far as she could tell, it was not his habit to brag about how much money he spent. The fact that he had ordered her such a beautiful and tasteful gift while under the many pressures of Bourbon’s production had impressed her. Or had he made Will order it? She really hoped not, especially now. Yet whoever had ordered it, the bracelet seemed proof that Renn was wooing her, that their involvement was probably more than a fling to him.
At one thirty in the morning, sleep still not close enough, she wished that Will had never come to New Orleans. She had been perfectly happy before his arrival, when all she had wanted was to concentrate on her new relationship with Renn and on acting as capably as she could in her role as Lily, the film’s heroine. What could Will possibly be expecting her to say to him? “You’re irresistible”? “I’m dumping your dad, and as soon as this movie wraps, let’s elope”? Maybe he only wanted her because he couldn’t have her, and certainly not without a big scene where someone was likely to get hurt badly.
Finally, at 2:00 a.m., she got up and took one of Renn’s sleeping pills, and all the next day she felt alternately sluggish and anxious, wondering when she would see Will, and why he affected her as he did. He was very sweet and good-looking, but his poem and its schoolboy earnestness affected her more than his looks. And the fact that he had bluntly told her he desired her, knowing as he did that she was seeing his father—it was this impulse, its rebelliousness, and above all, its murky, masculine competitiveness—that attracted her most.
Will didn’t appear where she was until five that afternoon. He couldn’t meet her eyes because he was with his father, and when he turned and left the set, she glanced timidly at his retreating back, his shoulders slumping as if in resignation or defeat. There seemed no way that anything could happen between them. But she didn’t think she wanted anything to happen, either. Most plainly, she wasn’t free, and he was also seeing someone else—a woman whom Elise could even imagine herself liking if they were to meet. Will had no business cheating, nor did she. And his father, as calculating as it might be to think such a thing, would undoubtedly be able to do more for her, was, in fact, already doing so much for her.
5.
Even in early adolescence she had not believed that she could settle for the kind of life that it seemed most adults she knew had settled for. While her friends were already discussing how many children they would have, what kind of houses and cars they wanted, and where they would work and live and take their vacations, she was thinking that she might do something else, that maybe she could be famous and not have to live in a brick ranch house with three small bedrooms and plumbing problems because tree roots had grown into the pipes. She did not want to marry her high-school sweetheart, who was likely to become fat and lazy by the time he reached thirty. She had read too many Cosmopolitan articles and Dear Abby columns about infidelity and marital discord before her seventeenth birthday that it was probable that marriage’s supposed enchantments had been spoiled for her for life.
As for her nebulous desire to be famous, her mother had enrolled her and her sister in tap dance and ballet classes starting when they were four, and although Elise had done well in both, she had not been the best student in the class. Her sister Belle had been a little better than Elise was, but what interested Belle most about the classes were the costumes—the special shoes and leotards and especially the tutus they got to wear for the ballet recitals. Belle was her mother’s daughter: infatuated with pink and ruffles, and learning to sew, and matching her hair ribbons to her shoes and girl-sized purses. Elise was her father’s daughter: athletic, impatient with clothes that needed to be ironed and hung in the closet, bookish and boyish-looking until she reached puberty and suddenly she had breasts, as well as shapely arms and legs that extended far beyond hemlines. By fifteen, she was two inches shy of six feet and growing into the face she would have when a film director visiting Austin for the South by Southwest Music Festival in the spring of Elise’s junior year at UT spotted her in a club and gave her his card and asked her to call him because she might be the girl he was looking for to play the daughter of a character Diane Keaton had all but committed to playing in this director’s next picture. Elise had the look—she was that memorable.
A week later, she did call him and he remembered her, but instead of flying her to Hollywood, he asked her to send headshots, ones she had a friend take because she couldn’t afford to hire a professional photographer, and when she sent them off to the director, he didn’t acknowledge their receipt for two months, and by that time, she was dating the French professor, but the director didn’t forget her, and it was he who called in early October and asked if she might be interested in auditioning for a comic role in a film about two brothers who were driving the corpse of their eccentric uncle cross-country in order to complete a secret burial ritual, one his will had specified. She thought it sounded like a very stupid movie but she agreed to audition, and then it turned out to be a Vince Vaughn picture and she knew that she would take the role if they thought she was good enough. She had been in the drama club in high school and had acted in three plays in college, but had only had small roles because the acting students always won the leads. It was clear to her that the director wanted her mostly because he liked the way she looked, but there were plenty of others who had started out this way too.
The dead-uncle movie ended up being a big hit, and she was offered roles that were much better, but paid much less. Even so, her agent said, “Take a couple of them and raise your stock, because the people who make the better studio movies will see that you can actually act.”
When her parents saw that she was succeeding, they were relieved but worried that she had been forced to do things that compromised her self-respect, which she hadn’t, not really, though the director she’d met in Austin had made it clear while they were filming Uncle Fenstad’s Last Request that he would be game for an affair if she were interested. She was not at all attracted to him, and he was newly married. By flirting outrageously but pretending a religious aversion to adultery, she was able to sidestep his offer without crushing his ego. This performance, she realized a year or so later, had been much better than the one memorialized on celluloid for Uncle Fenstad.
Her sister’s reaction to her success was more complicated than their parents’; Belle was jealous and felt excluded but was also intensely curious and, like their mother, full of grim warnings. “They’re eventually going to want you to show your tits,” she said. “They’ll make you, I bet.”
“Not if I have it written in my contract that I won’t show them.”
“You can do that?” said Belle, disbelieving.
“Yes. A lot of women do.”
“But you’re just starting out, so you’re probably going to have to do things you don’t want to.”
“Maybe, but I’m not going to worry about that until I have to.”
“Well, I’d worry about it now. You should be prepared.”
Since graduating from the University of North Texas two years before Elise left for Hollywood, Belle had been living in Dallas with their parents and was employed as a social worker at a county medical clinic where she counseled immigrants and other disenfranchised poor. Elise admired her but suspected that her sister had already had a bit of a martyr complex before taking the clinic job, which was underpaid, exhausting, and full of miserable cases that Elise tried not to imagine, at least not with any frequency. She and Belle had been very close as girls, but when Elise was growing into her long-limbed body, Belle grew awkward in hers, and she gained more weight from late-night pizzas and candy bars at college than anyone had expected. That most of the boys who called the house, starting when Elise was in ninth grade and Belle in twelfth, were asking for the younger, not the older sister had been one of the first wedges to come between them.
Another wedge: after Uncle Fenstad, Elise donated fifteen thousand dollars to Belle’s clinic, hoping this would help restore her to Belle’s good graces, but her largesse had the opposite effect—Belle resented that she didn’t earn anywhere near enough money to be able to make the donation herself. Their mother also seemed unnaturally accepting of Belle’s self-pitying tendencies and general unhappiness—“Belle has such a good heart. I just don’t understand why there isn’t some decent young man out there who will see how wonderful she is and adore her as much as she deserves to be adored.” It was disorienting and upsetting to feel her mother’s and sister’s growing hostility in regard to her own good fortune. When Elise made the mistake of saying to her mother during an argument that she and Belle were resentful of her for doing so well on her own, her mother grew very chilly: “I can’t believe you would say such an ungracious thing about your sister and me. Shame on you, Elise. We have always wished for nothing but happiness for you.”
As the phone calls home grew more stilted after Elise moved from Austin to California, she made them less often. Her father was the one constant; he sounded the same as always—cheerful but missing her, supportive but cautious. He also visited her more frequently than either her mother or sister did, Belle saying that she had trouble getting time off from work, which Elise knew was mostly true. Her mother worked too; she was part owner of a flower and garden shop, and the other owner was often at home, attending to a disabled son. Her mother also said that she did not like L.A.; she found its endless highway systems ugly and frightening, and the people unfriendly and self-obsessed.
“But they’re like that everywhere, Mom,” Elise said. “Dallas isn’t exactly the altruism capital of the world either.”
“I know that,” Mrs. Connor said tartly, “but people are worse where you are.”
About these strained family ties, Renn had given Elise what she thought was good advice: “Just wait it out. This is all as new for them as it is for you.” Later he added, “It can be rough when the people you’re close to become successful, especially if things stay the same for you.”
6.
It wasn’t a Freudian slip, at least she didn’t think it was, but she had acted careless in a way that she usually never did: she left Will’s poem on the desk in her room, only half covered by a folder of hotel stationery. She kept going back to read it and didn’t always take an extra few seconds to put it away. Most of the time she went to Renn’s room anyway, because it was bigger than hers. But four nights after Will had given her the poem, Renn stopped by unexpectedly while she was still getting dressed for dinner. Before she had any idea what he was doing, Renn had read the poem and set it back on the desk.
“My son wrote that, didn’t he,” he said. “I had no idea he was a poet.”
She was in the bathroom, applying mascara. Hearing his words, she froze.
He stood in the doorway now, looking at her, his expression carefully nonchalant. “I don’t want you to bother lying about it, Elise. I recognize the handwriting. If you’re interested in him, you can tell me. If he’s the one you prefer, okay, but I don’t want you seeing both of us.”
He was smiling, but she could see that he was upset. I’m going to screw this up, she thought, feeling guilty, even though she knew that she had done nothing wrong. It didn’t seem like she had, in any case.
“He’s not the one I prefer,” she said, putting the mascara wand back in its tube. She went to Renn and hugged him. “Not at all. You’re the one I want.”
Renn let her embrace him for a second but then pulled back to look into her face. “What does he think he’s doing, writing poems for you? He knows we’re together.”
She hesitated. “Have you told him that we are?”
“He knows.”
“If you didn’t tell him, maybe he didn’t.”
“But you told him after he gave you the poem?”
“Yes.” She paused. “Wait. Maybe he said that he knew you and I were dating, but he still wanted to give me the poem.”
Renn’s face colored.
“Did he.”
F*ck, she thought. I’m so f*cking stupid.
“He might not have. I can’t remember,” she said.
“Try.”
She could feel herself start to sweat. “I really don’t remember, Renn. I know he said that he wasn’t much of a writer but he was going to give me the poem anyway. That must have been what he said.”
“He’s not in a very good place right now, Elise. He’s never had a real job, and he’s almost twenty-seven. I think he’s suffering from depression, but I doubt he’d acknowledge it if anyone asked him. The kid has been spoiled his whole life, and I can admit that some of this is his mother’s and my fault, but some of it is his. His sister is about to finish medical school at the top of her class, and the two of them couldn’t be more different if one of them had been raised by wolves, the other by nuns.”
“I’m not interested in him,” she said. “Really, I’m not.”
“You’re your own woman, and I won’t tell you what you should or shouldn’t do, but if you’re going to be with me, there can’t be any others.”
“There aren’t,” she said. “That’s the truth.”
He studied her for a long moment before pulling her to his chest.
“Good, because I won’t share you.
I’m not capable of it.” “I’m not either,” she said.
“You’re the only woman I’m seeing, Elise. If you weren’t, I wouldn’t have any right to tell you not to see someone else.”
She hoped he would never find out that she had gone to Will’s room two nights earlier to thank him for the poem and had allowed herself to be invited in, the door closed behind her. They had talked for a minute, Will blushing, she nervous and a little giddy, and then she had let him kiss her. She had let him put his arms around her and she had put hers around him, her body pressed against his, and she had felt his hardness while they kissed, and then she had pulled away, guilty with her desire for him, and ashamed of herself for giving in to her curiosity and lust when she was the girlfriend of Renn Ivins, a handsome and very talented actor-director-screenwriter whom she knew she should consider herself lucky to work with, let alone share a bed with.
Will had said nothing after she pulled away, even though she meekly apologized before leaving him in his bachelor’s room with its bedside lamp illuminating the rumpled bed, the sheets and comforter twisted violently, as if by a fever victim.
7.
One thing she had been warned about but had found herself unprepared for was how it seemed that almost everyone she knew now felt entitled to gifts of money from her. Loans she would have been more amenable to, but the few people who pretended they were asking for loans made it seem as if it were a joke—she had enough money, didn’t she? Why couldn’t she just give it to them? Ha ha. Only kidding.
They also wanted auditions or some sort of industry job or introductions to other famous people, whether she knew them or not. They wanted invitations to A-list parties (or B- and C-list—any Hollywood party would do), and life-size cardboard cutouts of characters in films that had been released years earlier. They wanted to borrow the clothes she had worn for a role, which were the studio’s, not hers. They wanted to stay at her house for a couple of weeks while they looked for a place of their own, or else they just wanted to live with her, period, and be a part of her entourage, because surely she had one. Didn’t all famous people have entourages? Even worse was that people she had barely said three words to in high school or college were somehow finding her private e-mail address or phone number or else they were leaving messages at the studio asking her to help them break in to the business. She was also being asked to donate to every imaginable charity, to put in guest appearances at fund-raisers and hospital galas and company picnics and grocery store and car-dealership grand openings and the quinceñera for her landscaper’s daughter. When she complained about these requests to her agent, he told her to let her personal assistant or her publicist talk to the demand-makers; she should never talk to them herself. When she complained to Renn, he laughed and said, “You’ll need to get used to these kinds of requests as fast as you can. The more successful you are, the worse it gets.”
In airports, at the post office and the gas station and Starbucks, she was asked for her autograph. She was told how beautiful she was—even more so in person than on the silver screen! (a claim she didn’t really believe)—how talented, how destined she was for everything a person could hope for: Oscars, Golden Globes, the perfect husband, the perfect children, the perfect house and house pets and gardener and poolmen and Grammys. (Oh wait, Ms. Connor, those are for singers, aren’t they?)
Because now, quite suddenly, she had something that tyrants and revolutionaries had waged wars over for thousands of years: power—both financial and sexual. It was not an illusion either; she could ask for any material object or personal service that she desired, pay for it, and have it delivered, overnight or later that same day. Any straight man she wanted, she could probably also have. Her power alarmed her, and on one morning when the sun shone furiously behind her heavy silk shantung curtains (new and expensively hand-sewn) at the house she had bought in Laurel Canyon less than a year earlier, she had been seriously resistant to getting out of bed. This was after Bourbon at Dusk had wrapped, while Renn spent four nearly sleepless weeks editing the film, fortifying himself with caffeine and something stronger from his doctor, she suspected—during which she was alone with him precisely five times, one of them on New Year’s Eve, and only for three hours. He couldn’t afford any real breaks until he was done editing the dozens of scenes they had shot into a presentable enough format to submit to the Cannes Festival’s screening committee by their mid-February deadline.
She had gone home to Dallas for Christmas because she knew that Renn planned to see Will and Anna and then go right back to editing. Elise wasn’t sure if she would be invited and assumed not, considering Will’s love poem, which Renn had not brought up again, but it was still there between them like a small electric force field. Nonetheless, he had wanted her to stay in L.A. so that they could be together when he wasn’t working. She had planned to visit her parents for four days but left on the morning of the third day because she and her mother had argued so often, and her sister had recently been dumped by a guy she had gone to high school with, who, a few minutes before breaking up with her, had asked for Elise’s e-mail address, something that it seemed Mrs. Connor blamed Elise for more than Belle’s ex.
Coming home from Texas, she had felt depressed and sad and resentful of the unfair treatment her mother and sister had inflicted on her. Renn told her that it would pass, and although he sounded sympathetic and told her to come straight from the airport to his place, she said that she would see him in the morning if he could spare an hour or two because she knew that he worked best at night and she didn’t want to distract him. In fact, she wanted to go home and mope. She did not feel like talking to anyone, especially after having to be nice to the few dozen strangers who had stopped her at both airports to ask for her autograph. She could only hold a smile for so long before it started to feel like her face would freeze into a permanent grimace.
At home, she put her suitcase in the guest bedroom closest to the master bedroom. She had left two other larger suitcases in there already, neither of them unpacked. Her days were so busy, or else she felt too tired to put away the clothes she had taken to New Orleans, despite being home for more than a month now. Her next project, You Knew Me When, would start in late February, and most of it would be filmed in southern California, with one two-week shoot in Argentina scheduled for early April, but she didn’t know when she would bother to unpack the New Orleans suitcases, and now she had the Dallas one too. It seemed easier to buy new suitcases, which could be purchased online in about three minutes, and she also grew tired of her clothes so quickly these days that she preferred to shop for new ones rather than unpack the old ones and keep wearing them. She had told no one that she was doing this; she knew it was shameful, the opposite of her parents’ admirable thriftiness. Her thought was that eventually she would donate her old clothes to charity or give some of them to Belle if she lost enough weight and wanted to take them.
She could have had her housekeeper unpack the suitcases for her; Marita had offered several times, but Elise wasn’t yet used to the idea of someone else organizing and maintaining her wardrobe. Gwynn, her personal assistant, who was ten years older, very efficient, and not particularly talkative, which was fine with Elise, could have been asked to unpack the suitcases too, but she had not told Gwynn about them, fearing her disapproval, or worse, the confused, vaguely scornful look that would pass across her face while Elise tried to explain herself.
8.
A week before Elise left for Argentina, two things happened: Belle tried to kill herself—halfheartedly, as it turned out, but it nonetheless deeply frightened Elise and her parents. The second thing was that Will wrote to her; it was the first time she had heard from him since he’d left New Orleans.
Elise was only given a day and a half off from You Knew Me When to fly home to Dallas to visit her sister in the hospital, and although she tried to get another day off, the producers said, No way in hell. Her sister looked pale and puffy and embarrassed when Elise arrived in her hospital room, their parents sitting nearby, faces drawn and very weary.
Elise didn’t know what to say, other than “Why would you do this to yourself? To our parents? What the f*ck were you thinking?” She kept her mouth closed.
Belle cried when Elise leaned down to the bed to hug her, and Elise started crying too. “I’m sorry,” Belle said weakly into her sister’s hair.
Elise could feel Belle’s tears on her neck and wondered for a witless second if she was responsible for Belle’s misery. If she hadn’t gone to that club and met the director . . . if she hadn’t called him back . . . if Uncle Fenstad hadn’t done so well . . . but these were ridiculous thoughts. Even so, they persisted. If only Belle were a brother, then the sibling rivalry would be of a different shade, if it existed at all. From what she had been told, Renn’s brother Phil handled Renn’s success capably. Sisters, however, especially ones close in age, rarely seemed to be devoted allies, something Elise had figured out in high school.
Her mother was too stricken with grief and worry to start an argument about anything, and when she flew back to L.A. the next day, Elise felt a little more secure in her relationships with her mother and sister than she had in a while. Belle had told her that she hadn’t actually wanted to kill herself, but she had been so angry at her ex-boyfriend, having seen him out with another girl the night before, that she supposed she had wanted to show him what a bastard he was.
Elise wondered if Belle had lost her virginity to the bastard, but she didn’t ask. Belle claimed to have lost it her freshman year in college, but Elise had never been sure, especially because her sister had gotten so chubby, and as far as Elise knew, Belle had not had a boyfriend in Denton during her four college years.
Before she went to the airport, Elise offered her sister a gift. “If you’d like to go to a spa and relax for a couple of weeks, I’ll send you to one I like in Scottsdale. There’s a great one in Cabo San Lucas too, if you don’t mind going to Mexico.”
“I’m not sure,” her sister said wanly. “I’ll let you know.”
“I think it’d be really good for you.”
“I look so bad in a swimsuit,” said Belle.
“Don’t be silly. It’s a spa. You can wear a robe the whole time you’re there if you want to. You can sit on the veranda and read romance novels and not do a thing except get a massage and eat fresh fruit all day.”
“I’ll have to think about it,” was all Belle would say.
Before Will called her, he sent an e-mail asking if she minded if he called, and if she didn’t, could he have her number? He had gotten her e-mail address from his sister, who had most likely gotten it from their father, but Will didn’t know for sure. He included his own phone number in the e-mail, saying that if she wanted to, she could always call him. But she didn’t call, nor did she know what to say in response to his e-mail, so she stalled. Before she had a chance to think of a tactful reply, he called her. Hearing his voice, her stomach and heart both leaped. It was as if he were in the same room, about to kiss her again.
“Can I see you?” he said, no hello, no awkward pleasantries.
“How did you get my number?”
“I’ve had it since New Orleans.” He hesitated. “My dad gave it to me when I first got there. He gave me all of the main cast members’ cell numbers.”
“. . . Will, I don’t think it’d be a good idea for us to see each other.”
“Does that mean you don’t want to see me, or you don’t think you should?”
“I don’t think I should.”
“Why not?”
“You know why. Because I’m with your father.”
“But maybe you could be with me instead if you wanted to.”
She sighed. “No.”
“Could you translate that?”
“No,” she repeated.
He was silent. Then he said, his voice breaking, “I can’t stop thinking about you, Elise. I don’t know what to do about it because I’ve tried to date other people since Danielle and I broke up, but I haven’t been interested in anyone else.”
She felt her throat constrict. She wanted to see him, but would not let herself tell him. It would be a mistake, for so many reasons. “I’m sorry, but I can’t be with you. I just can’t.”
“Break up with him. I think you might want to be with me instead.”
“I haven’t heard from you in over five months, and now you’re calling to tell me to break up with your father?”
“You know it’s been five months?”
“Yes, of course I do.” She paused. “I have to hang up now, Will.”
He was silent.
“Will,” she said, plaintive and impatient. “I have to hang up. Please say good-bye.”
He still didn’t speak, and after a few more seconds, she hung up on him, sick as it made her feel. It was only five days since she had gotten back from Dallas, and although her sister was home again and had taken a leave of absence from work, Elise continued to feel off-kilter and anxious, and You Knew Me When was no longer as much of a joy as it had been before. She had had trouble sleeping since Belle’s hospitalization, and Will’s e-mail hadn’t helped. And now this phone call where he had put her on the spot, and to her alarm, she had felt a strange elation when he’d said, “I think you might want to be with me instead.” But why did she? He had no job and no clear idea of what he wanted to do professionally, and he also seemed to resent his father’s success, just as her sister and mother resented hers. Her life had been going along fine without him. She was in a relationship with a man she desired and respected; she was acting in good films and making a lot of money. Bourbon was going to premier at Cannes, and she would get to go there with Renn and it would be her first visit to the south of France and everything would be perfect if she could learn to focus on what was good for her rather than trying to sabotage her life by letting in the chaos she seemed lately to be so attracted to.
Will’s number was in her phone now, and his e-mail was on her computer. He was offering her something that she knew she shouldn’t want because it could not compete with what she already had. But he was competing anyway, and she had to admire his bravado, taking on a man like his father who did not, as far as she could tell, ever lose.