Chapter 8
A Good Person
What I have documented here, in my fifty-third year, from June through October, on a Sony ICD-SX712 digital recorder, is intended to assist an authorized biographer after my death. Or, perhaps like Mr. Twain (he and I are hardly of the same intellectual caste, I realize), I will act as my own biographer/ghostwriter, and publish a transcript of the following as part of a posthumous autobiography. The pun seems apt, because in a way, I will be speaking from the grave. Although I won’t instruct the executors of my estate to wait a hundred years to release this material as Mr. Twain did with his own, I will tell them to wait no fewer than five—long enough, I hope, for any arguments over my last will and testament to have lost their initial, most potent virulence (if there is any virulence between my heirs—maybe there won’t be).
A few of the following revelations, needless to say, will not be particularly flattering—for myself or for my closest family members. It might be that none of these revelations will be released until after my children, Anna and Billy, have also passed on, if ever. But this detail is something that I will have to decide at a later date.
A. HOW IS IT THAT. . .
“When did you realize that you wanted to be an actor?” “Or did you always know that you would become one?” “Who are your role models?” “Who is the real Renn Ivins?” “Is there a real Renn Ivins?” “What are your secrets?”
They don’t stop asking these questions, however many times I’ve already answered them, one way or another. Who, if he has a shred of sanity, is stupid enough to tell a journalist his secrets, especially the darker ones? And isn’t it clear why people want to become actors? They want to be loved. They want to be rich. They want to have sex with beautiful people who will never forget them. They want revenge on all of the kids who used to pick on them. They want revenge on everyone who didn’t believe in them enough or dismissed them outright, despite how pathetic or dull these dismissers’ own lives were. They want to be forgiven their selfishness and thoughtlessness. If you become famous, more people than you expect will forgive you for things you probably shouldn’t be forgiven for, though there is also the chance that you will never be forgiven and that your disgrace will make international headlines, ones that might generate enough profit for the people reporting the story to retire to Monaco before year’s end.
Some advice: two questions that interviewers should ask but don’t (except for one guy who was doing an article for Vanity Fair a few years ago, when The Zoologist was released), probably because they know that I won’t answer them honestly either: “What’s it like for you to grow old in Hollywood?” and “How do you think it’s different for men than women?” Grow old—does this mean that the journalist thought I was old already? These questions aren’t exactly polite, but at least they’re not stupid. I told the Vanity Fair guy that I didn’t really feel like I was getting old, only more experienced. I remember his expression, something between a frown and a smirk, and I also remember feeling angry but hiding it from him. He sensed it anyway, because what he wrote was, “Ivins seems to be suffering from the collective Hollywood delusion that if you’re rich and famous enough, the rules of gravity don’t apply to you.” Frankly, he’s wrong about this. I do feel the gravitational pull that in due time will bring all of us down, but I’m fighting it. Almost everyone I know seems to live more in fear of aging visibly than of dying from cancer or seeing their children die before they do. Maybe even more than losing all of their money, and it’s as bad with men as it is with women. I have booked a few Botox appointments but so far have avoided the face-lifter’s scalpel and the antiaging snake oil sold in the back of otherwise reputable magazines. Despite all of our purported brainpower and common sense, human beings are truly a sad and ridiculous species.
That sounds cynical, I suppose. But despite our fears and vanities, I do think we are capable of selflessness and love and great empathic leaps of imagination. Many of us can and do appreciate beauty. We do not want to grow old, in part because it means that someday we will not be around to appreciate the things we find beautiful. Aging also implies that we will not be loved in the same ways that we were when we were younger. So few of us like change, especially when something is being subtracted rather than added. I don’t think that many of us are conditioned to lose: only to gain, to succeed.
B. FORTUNES TOLD
Lucy, the mother of my two children, hated the fact that I started to consult an astrologer not long after our son was born. A director I was working with at the time, one who helped me get my first Oscar nomination, put me in touch with a woman named Isis Durand who lived way out in Upland. For years, apparently, she had helped him make decisions about which projects to take on, which people to trust, which days he should try not to travel, at least not by air. “She’s unbelievable,” he told me. “I can talk to her for five minutes on the phone, and for days afterward, I feel like everything is exactly as it should be. Nothing else works for me like that. Not pills or p-ssy or money.”
To be clear, I was very skeptical, because before meeting Isis, I didn’t bother to read my horoscope, let alone pay some expensive psychic to tell me my future. No one could tell the future; in lucid moments, I did not doubt this. And how could it be that the constellations had anything to do with whether I would encounter unforeseen obstacles on a certain day or meet an important stranger who would make me think twice about a career goal? To make matters worse, I was married to a doctor, someone who put her faith in science and facts, little else, a quality I had initially admired in her very much.
The reason I ended up contacting Isis is that my agent received two phenomenal screenplays, and I wanted to do them both, but the director and producers for each project weren’t going to wait around for me to film one and then the other. The directors were rivals, and I knew that whoever’s I made my second choice would likely never ask me to work with him again. They were both extremely successful, and egomaniacal, and I was still in the early years of my career, and how I handled this would matter a lot. These things still matter a lot, but I’m no longer as vulnerable to the whims of the powerful because, to be frank, I have some of that power now too.
Isis already knew about my dilemma when I called her. It’s obvious to me now that my director friend had probably tipped her off, but at the time I was too awestruck and naive to figure that out. I’ve known her now for twenty-five years, and aside from her advice about signing on to do that humiliating flop, The Writing on the Wall, she’s more or less always been on the money. She’s old now and often sick, but I’ve done my share to keep her alive. When she told me a few years ago that she had breast cancer but no insurance, I gave her most of the money for her treatments. During that time, she wouldn’t meet with me in person, but she did take my calls. Her treatments have cost me almost a million dollars, but spread out over a couple of years, that’s not so much money. I’d probably have paid ten times as much if I’d had to. A number of the checks that I gave her for her treatments were written out to a Dr. Selzer, but about half of them I wrote out directly to her. It could be that she’s the biggest con artist out there—I have thought of this, but I really don’t think she is. We’ve known each other too long, and I’ve paid her too well for her to have any complaints in that respect.
Even so, if she was conning me, it doesn’t matter that much. Who knows what my career would have become if she hadn’t been advising me these past two and a half decades?
Based in part on the reading she did for me not long before we wrapped on Bourbon at Dusk, I decided to submit it to the Cannes Film Festival’s screening committee, nearly killing my relationship with Elise to make the mid-February deadline. It had been five years since I’d last been to the festival, and that year the film was one that I’d only acted in, not directed and co-written, not invested more than two years of my life in—finding the right producers, casting it, writing the screenplay with my friend Scott Jost, who unlike me is a screenwriter by profession, but mostly he edited what I’d written, though he would say that he wrote as much original material as I did.
Bourbon was a runner-up for the Palme d’Or, and so it earned a “Grand Prix,” which is fine, but the French-Israeli filmmakers who won the Palme for their “gritty, neo-realist drama about child prostitution in an age of urban anomie” were possibly the most ungracious bastards I’ve ever had the misfortune of spending an evening with. The director said to me point-blank two hours before the winner was named, “I liked your film, Mr. Ivins, but I do not think it is good enough. I do not think that mine is good enough either, so this is not meant as an insult.”
Well, let me put it this way—if it sounds like an insult, it most likely is an insult. In fairness to this guy, I think he was drunk, but five minutes later, his producer stoked the fire by saying, “I agree with Henri. Bourbon is a good film but not a great one. Our film is maybe very good but not great either.”
It could be that they were jealous of the fact I was with Elise, who they might not have known was my girlfriend before meeting us at the festival. These two balding gnomes couldn’t keep their eyes off of her, and when she was polite but not flirtatious with them, I suppose they decided to take out their sexual jealousy on me by insulting Bourbon. I could see these guys calling her when we were back in L.A., begging her to star in their next film. It made me sick to my stomach to think about this, especially because I would tell her not to do it and she would probably get angry. In my experience, no one I know in Hollywood has ever spoken frankly about jealousy, an emotion as natural and certainly as painful as any others that we feel. Because of this tacit code of silence, it is very hard to truly be friends with many of the people who work in film. We are a jealous, neurotic group, both disdainful of and avid to be in the public eye; always comparing ourselves to other people, and so worried about losing what we have that half of us have been hollowed out by ulcers and fear, not to mention unchecked ego, by the time we turn forty.
Later that night, Elise went on to win the award for best leading actress, and when they called her name, I felt this unsettling mix of paternal pride and amorous longing. She had never looked better than she did at that ceremony, and she is a woman who looks good every single minute of the day. Her skin, which is a honey color that I would guess a lot of people, both men and women, would run down a pedestrian for, was glowing in a way that I had never seen before, such was her extreme pleasure in being the object of so much admiration and respect. She had chosen a Dior dress for the occasion—a pure, poetic statement in mauve silk, one that hugged her tall, slender body. All night, even after we didn’t win the Palme d’Or, I kept thinking about unzipping that dress, pressing my lips to her warm and fragrant neck, saying and doing the things that make her blush, things that she loves but would never admit to unless the lights were off.
She is not, however, a woman simply coasting by on her beauty until it runs out. She is sharp and very talented, her presence in front of the camera so natural that none of the seams show, which they do with lesser actors. The first time I saw her, which was in this asinine picture a friend of mine directed about two nitwits driving their dead uncle cross-country, I almost fell out of my chair. At the time, Scott and I were arguing daily over the fourth draft of Bourbon at Dusk, Isis was taking two or three days to return my calls, and a number of things were in flux with both the story line and the project’s funding, but even without Isis’s input, I knew that Elise would be the perfect woman to play Lily, the female lead. When I called her agent and had the script sent over after Scott and I had finally finished it, the agent called back the very next afternoon to say that Elise wanted the role more than anything she had wanted in her entire life. This was probably only agent-speak, but regardless of how much he was exaggerating about her response, it was clear that she was interested. The producers liked her too, which I was almost certain they would. After a quick screen test, we agreed on a salary, figured out the shoot schedule, and signed a contract. Then she was mine. For about nine weeks, anyway.
I realize that the age difference makes some people pause. But it’s not my tendency to imagine failure. At the same time, I’m not a simpleton; I know that it’s possible that Elise and I will not stay together until death do us part, but there seems no point in assuming that our relationship is only a temporary diversion, something to amuse ourselves with until we each find someone better. She is generous, kind, easygoing. I have never met anyone like her, and to state the obvious, I have met a lot of people. Her appetite for the world is one of the things that I like most about her. Before we went to Cannes, she hired a tutor to help tune up her college French, and once there, her sudden facility with the language surprised me and a number of other people. I’ve never known anyone who could speak a foreign language so well without having studied for at least a few months in the country of origin. “You must have had a good teacher when you were in college,” I told her, and she gave me sort of a strange look and said, “Well, yes, I guess I did.”
“I bet there’s more to that story,” I said.
But she only shook her head and said that she guessed she just had a good ear for languages. There probably is more to it than this, but it’s not my habit to pressure girlfriends for detailed histories of their past relationships or flings. Elise would likely have told me if I’d probed a bit, but the last thing I need to do is act the jealous boyfriend who also happens to be old enough to be her father. In fact, I think I might even be a couple of years older than both of her parents. But really, so what. My body is still in very good working order. I see no reason not to be with her if she wants to be with me too.
In Cannes to celebrate her leading-actress win, I bought her a three-carat emerald ring. It was too soon to buy her a diamond, in part because everyone would have cried “Engagement!” as eager as the media is to marry its stars off, often with the tacit hope that things will soon devolve into a spectacularly acrimonious divorce. Although I’m not eager to get married again, the thought has crossed my mind a few times. I know that at some point she does want to get married, though maybe not to me, and I haven’t dared to ask if she wants kids, nor has she told me. I’d really prefer not to have another child; raising kids is one of the things that I probably am too old for, or else I just don’t want to devote the energy to it again. Still, if having a baby turned out to be one of her fondest wishes, I’d probably have to give in.
C. J1 AND J2
I keep two journals—one of them, J1, to be published after my death if the executor of my estate (who is my attorney, not one of my kids) thinks enough people will want to read it. The other journal, J2, I don’t and won’t share with anyone. To protect the people I leave behind (and myself, sure), I start a new notebook each year and destroy the one that precedes it. This is where I write down the things that I have done or the thoughts I have had that sometimes make it hard to sleep at night. I can’t talk to my psychiatrist about these things because I don’t want him to think badly of me (not any more than he probably already does). Despite the risks, I need to keep this second journal because it’s like a pressure valve—if it weren’t there, my life would blow up.
There are entries about my relationship with Isis in J2, entries about my ex-wives and other women and my children and friends and brother. I’ve also written about shady things that I have witnessed and done nothing about, things I have done myself and later regretted, or, sometimes, regretted while I was doing them. I almost never read through the book before I burn it each year, always on January first—I think of this as a cleansing, a way to start over, and I always hope that each year there will be fewer entries, or shorter ones, or ones that could go in my other journal, the one for public consumption.
Lucy, I think, has seen one or two of the J2s, which is why, probably, she never believed me when I lied to her about a few things that happened while I was on location (or, once in a while, at home in L.A.). She would never admit to reading my journal, but I’m almost certain that she did—the specificity of her complaints and accusations made me realize that she had to have read some part of that year’s J2. I have always tried to keep it locked up in the glove compartment of my car when I’m not at home. If I am, I keep it in a desk drawer, one in which I eventually had a special lock installed (too late, unfortunately, to keep the diary from Lucy) because desk locks, my brother Phil and I discovered while we were growing up and snooping in our father’s study, can be picked with bobby pins or the kind of tiny screwdriver used to repair eyeglasses.
Each year’s J2 always starts off slow—only a few entries for the first several months, but then, around June or July, for some reason, things start to shift—Isis says that for some people, myself included, the summer months are known for creating full-moon conditions for weeks on end. The full moon seems to stir up the crazy elements that ricochet through a person’s life. Even the police blotters attest to this—full moon fever is real. It’s a little unfortunate that I live with it for almost half the year—things don’t start to calm down until November or early December for me. Last year, that was also the case, and there was no little whimper either. Things ended with a big bang—the debacle with Billy in New Orleans. Not long before I asked him to work for me on the Bourbon set, Isis told me that some rogue element was coming right at me, but I didn’t suspect that it would be my own son.
D. PROBLEM CHILDREN
It took Elise and me about a week or so to come down from Cannes, during which time she was sometimes weepy and very tired. Her moroseness made me a little sullen too, or maybe it was just the jet lag. We argued more than we ever had before, more than we did during the month over the holidays that I did my kamikaze editing job on Bourbon with Fred Banes, who edited Javier’s Sons. I knew he’d be the right guy if he had time in his schedule to work with me for about five intense weeks. He didn’t, not really, mostly because his wife wanted him at home over Christmas and New Year’s, but he’s not divorced yet, so I think it worked out.
After we got back from France, Elise’s sister Belle started calling a few times a day and wanted to talk to her for an hour or more each time, and Elise absolutely did not have the space in her schedule for this, especially with our prerelease obligations for Bourbon—the several TV and radio interviews (only a couple of which we did together, though by now our relationship was common knowledge), the magazine photo shoots, the extra features for the DVD version that I had insisted on starting early, which included interviews with principal cast members and voice-over commentary from Elise, Marek, and myself. She was also reading scripts for the project that would follow the next two she had already committed to.
If it wasn’t clear to Elise, I could certainly tell that Belle was dealing with some serious emotional problems following her attempted suicide, which I did feel bad about, but there wasn’t a lot that Elise could do to make her better, not being a doctor (something she didn’t appreciate me reminding her of). Despite how depressed Belle was, I did not like that she was calling all the time and draining Elise’s energy, which made it nearly impossible for her to enjoy her talent and good fortune, and the heartening trajectory of her career, which was suddenly soaring. These were crucial months in Elise’s professional life, and if she couldn’t give the majority of her attention to her work and the people involved most closely with it, her preoccupation was likely to have serious repercussions on her future prospects.
“She’s my sister,” Elise said during one of our arguments, tired and angry. “What am I supposed to do? Hang up on her after five minutes?”
“You could stop answering your phone every time she calls,” I said.
“I don’t answer it every time.”
“No, but you answer it most of the time. She’s taking advantage of you. She knows you feel guilty about everything you’ve already been able to achieve while she sits at home in Dallas with your parents and mopes.”
“You don’t know my sister. She’s not like that.”
You’re either dreaming or lying, I wanted to say, but I didn’t.
I have my own problems, probably not as unpleasant as hers, but there are things that keep me up at night, even after they’ve been written down in J2 or J1. One of them is Bourbon’s release date. If I waited until October or November, I’d have a better shot at positioning it as an Oscar contender. Fall is Oscar season, when the bullshit that populates the theaters over the summer has mostly faded away and people are ready, with the end of their vacations and the return to school, to see some intelligent films. But a fall release also means that there’s more competition for serious moviegoers’ time and money.
On top of this, there is my inability to trust anyone with the oversight of my finances. Having been burned twice, predictably, I’m nervous about entrusting my investments and the general accounting activities related to my day-to-day life to a so-called professional, but unless I want to do it all myself, I have to trust the people who work for me. Fidelity and Wells Fargo seem trustworthy, and unlike the two crooked business managers I’ve worked with, the first a second cousin (he was also a supposedly reputable CPA when I hired him), they are large corporations that aren’t likely to bilk their clients in an underhanded way. Like any Fortune 500 company, they bilk their clients in broad daylight.
Yet another worry is my son. For one, I’m pretty sure that he still has a crush on Elise, and even though I’m not about to hand her over to him if she even wanted to go to him, which I’m pretty sure she doesn’t, I can admit that a match between them, at least where their ages are concerned, makes more sense. Born only two years apart, they grew up listening to the same music, using the same slang, watching the same television shows, wearing the same brands. Billy would also be able to give her more attention than I can because he isn’t dealing with publicists, agents, producers, fans, ex-wives, charity spokespeople, investment advisers, personal assistants—the list goes on and on—close to twenty-four hours a day. Basically, he could devote his life to her if this were something that she required. But the truth is, I can show Elise things that Billy cannot. I know a lot more about the world than he does, and if I were Elise and were choosing between him and myself, I’m pretty sure that I’d choose the same way she has.
She did choose me. I don’t even have to pretend that any of this is a hypothetical situation. When Billy tried to seduce her in New Orleans last fall, when he wrote her such an earnest love poem that the paper practically dripped blood and tears, she apparently told him, “Thank you, you’re sweet, but I’m quite happy with your father.” I’m sure Elise was very tactful. I was not. When I finally boiled over, a day or two after I saw the poem in Elise’s hotel room, I was not as calm as I should have been. I might be an actor who has won a number of major awards, but in this case, I was not able to perform the way that I should have. No punches were thrown, and I didn’t call him any names either, but what I did say was, “If you ever pull a stunt like that again, you won’t be able to draw one more cent from your trust account. For the first time in your life, you’ll actually have to work for a living.”
Does this qualify as blackmail? I don’t think so. But it was a threat, and a serious one that I intended to follow up on if forced to do so. If he were to run off with Elise, why should I support him? The thing is, I realize that I can’t know what he or Elise are up to twenty-four hours a day, nor do I want to, but I’d like to believe that she does love me, and that Billy has gotten his head on straight and has stopped trying to woo her away. It makes it more difficult to see him, because when I see him, obviously I’m not with Elise, and when I’m with her, I can’t be with him too. He and I have never had an easy relationship, at least not since his mother and I divorced. He wasn’t openly hostile after I left Lucy, but he moped around a lot and lacked the enthusiasm for life that a twelve-year-old usually has—boys his age generally want to go out and do things, they want to see their friends and play sports and go to pool parties and the mall and school mixers and amusement parks. Billy did do those things sometimes, but he wasn’t a kid known for being the life of the party. His sister was quiet too, but she was so often smiling and sweet and thoughtful, making me cards with drawings of our cats and dog, or hiding cute little notes in places where I’d find them later:
Dear Dad,
Why did the window go to the doctor? Because it had panes!
Love, Anna
And:
Dear Dad,
Did you know that coffee is the most recognizable smell in the world? Is that why you drink so much of it? Hee hee!
Anna
If Billy and I got along better, I’d have him work with me any time that he wanted to. We could even consider starting our own production company, but of course that’s now a pipe dream. One thing that I could really use him for is help starting a foundation that will give financial assistance and legal and medical aid to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. It doesn’t matter how many years have passed—New Orleans still hasn’t bounced back, and it’s not going to for a while, if it ever really does. If Bourbon makes any money, once we cover our production costs, five percent of the profits will be routed to my foundation, which I’ve tentatively named Life After the Storm. If you make even a third of the kind of money I do and don’t donate to worthy causes to any significant degree, you’re a bastard.
Hollywood liberal, yes, I know, but why shouldn’t I be? I have to wonder what it is the self-serving CEOs who run our country and the rest of the world are so afraid of. With their enormous assets scattered in banks and investments across the globe and their armies of hired bodyguards and vacation homes on four continents, why do they act as if they’re more vulnerable and besieged by the world’s miseries than the poorest forty percent here or abroad? I give fifteen percent of my annual earnings to the charities I believe in. Capitalism has been good to me—I won’t dispute that—but it hasn’t been good to everyone, and the number it continues to be good to shrinks every day. If this sounds like socialism or communism, so be it.
Fifteen percent of my annual earnings is a lot of money by most people’s standards—almost five million dollars last year, which was a particularly good year. But then, most of them have been since I graduated from college thirty years ago.
Something else that has been on my mind—my ex-wife Melinda Byers’s memoir, which is mostly about our marriage, and it has a title that I can’t help but find offensive: This Isn’t Gold. She must have been very bored and embittered up there in ugly, impoverished Santa Barbara or Big Sur, whichever house it was where she wrote that book. The terms of our divorce were generous—she will be very comfortable until she dies unless she really screws things up—but she still seems intent on trying to convince the world that she is a woman scorned, misunderstood, and generally wronged by the Fates and of course by her a*shole movie-star ex-husband.
I know that I must sound bitter too. No matter that I have everything society tells us that we can and should have. One thing I kept thinking about after I met those two French-Israelis in Cannes was how they reminded me of something an American director I’ve worked with said to me about American alpha males. His words won’t go away, because I’m pretty sure he’s right: “One of the reasons we dominate the film world and most everywhere else is because we’re bigger than most other men. I mean physically, not intellectually. We’re overfed, overgrown, and overconfident, and we’re so intent on winning any contest we can be a part of that if we’re not smart enough to win fairly, we’re strong enough to beat our rivals into submission.” I had the sense, standing next to the Palme d’Or-winning director and producer, that they hated me more for being a foot taller than they were than for having made a fine film, one that doesn’t feature any of the usual Hollywood crap—no guns, no drug abuse, no projectile vomiting, no car chases, no bar fights or catfights, no gratuitous cursing, no gold diggers, no midlife crises, no nine-year-olds giving their parents romantic advice. When we wrote the screenplay, Scott and I were very careful to avoid the usual stupid tropes.
Anyway, Melinda and her memoir. Isis has told me that the book has actually raised my stature in both the material and the spiritual worlds: I have acquired, at last, a fully formed soul. Because the rest of the world, if they care to look, can now see my flaws and insecurities more clearly. I have been summarily humbled, and great goodwill is coming my way as a result of this unsanctioned unveiling. I could be more skeptical about it, sure, but I choose not to be. If something like this—someone else’s words rather than a doctor’s prescription—brings you comfort, you shouldn’t sneer at it.
Elise, who doesn’t know anything about Isis, except that I talk to a psychic from time to time, thinks I should just be able to put Melinda’s memoir out of my mind, as does Anna. I know they’re right because there have been a lot of things printed about me that I’d prefer not to have out there. But nothing this personal, especially not from someone whom I was very close to at one time. When I met Melinda, she was beautiful, sweet, in need of rescue from low self-esteem and a bad marriage, and also endearingly starstruck, but not in the annoying way that fans sometimes are. She didn’t feel compelled to tell me every other minute how much she loved my work, how much better I was than every other actor, how her parents and friends would never believe she had met me—could she take my picture? Great! How about a few dozen more?
People are buying this memoir, and they aren’t buying it because they love how Melinda writes. I’m trying to feel flattered, but it’s not easy. She’s definitely not a writer, and she won’t ever write another book, unless she gets on the children’s book bandwagon, which it seems everyone, including the guy who trims the neighbors’ hedges, is probably about to cash in on.
My brother says I should sue for slander, but I don’t see the point. The book is already out there, living its own sorry life, having its sordid affairs, and unless every copy can be hunted down and destroyed and every reader’s memory of it wholly erased, the damage is done. Why bring more attention to it? I also have no desire to stand in a courtroom with Melinda a second time and look on the weary, knowing face of a judge who is likely to think we are both spoiled children.
We are a cheating species, both male and female, whether or not we are famous. Why, I would really like to know, does this fact continue to surprise and scandalize so many people?
Some people say, Isis included, that I should thank Melinda. After all, I’m getting older, and although I keep doing respectable work and might have the kind of longevity Clint Eastwood has had, I do know that the laws of gravity apply to me, despite what that Vanity Fair columnist wrote. I realize that I won’t always be interesting to moviegoers or journalists. I also realize that there is a date of expiration to all of these good times, one that I can’t predict; probably no one can, not even Isis. And this is something I have to live with because it can’t be burned away on the first day of every new year.
E. MUST-SEE
When you’re waiting for the reviews to come out, it’s like waiting for a hurricane to hit—you feel an almost unbearable tension and anxiety, but one that I think a lot of movie people are addicted to. To be talked about favorably, even fawningly; to see your name in the New York Times, the Guardian, Le Monde, La Repubblica, Der Spiegel, and any other major newspaper that still publishes movie reviews—this is one of the things people like me aspire to.
Some of the highlights—
More than 20 critics agree: Bourbon at Dusk, 4 out of 4 stars. A masterpiece. Bourbon at Dusk is the year’s first must-see.
—New York Times
Elise Connor is a revelation, an actress of the finest caliber. A star has indeed been born.
—Los Angeles Times
Renn Ivins proves that he can write and direct with the same intelligence and suppleness with which he acts. You really need to see this movie. As with Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke, Ivins and his co-writer Scott Jost have gotten to the heart of one of the biggest tragedies and failures of leadership in recent memory.
—The Oregonian
Marek Gilson is in his finest form. Think Newman and The Hustler.
—Entertainment Weekly
If you see only one movie this year, make sure it’s Bourbon at Dusk. I can’t stop thinking about it.
—Chicago Tribune
A truly humane portrait of a New Orleans family struggling to survive both the communal and personal horrors of life after Hurricane Katrina.
—FilmCritic.com
One of the few bad ones (and try as I might, I can’t forget what this f*cker wrote):
As if the world needs more tragedy porn. Ivins does a passable job as director, but couldn’t he have cast less pretty actors? Marek Gilson and Elise Connor spend half of the film looking like bewildered Abercrombie models plunked down in the middle of Waterworld.
—The Miami Herald
Aside from the Herald’s Waterworld cheap shot, after I read the reviews, I felt like I wouldn’t need to sleep for about two weeks straight, like I could run a two-hour marathon or grow wings and fly to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. It is one thing to be celebrated for a film you’ve done a good job acting in, quite another if it’s a film you’ve dreamed up on your own, written the screenplay for, hired the cast and crew, cobbled together the funding for, and then spent more than eight weeks in the sweltering heat of an on-location shoot and directed everyone to the best performances of their careers. This is my Apocalypse Now, my On the Waterfront, even, perhaps, my Citizen Kane. To celebrate, Elise and I flew up to Napa and had dinner at the French Laundry, where, in a stroke of mad generosity, I treated all the other diners to their meals. It cost me about twenty-eight thousand dollars, but I handed the waiter my credit card, and aside from making everyone’s day, I probably made some friends too.
No Palme d’Or, but the Best Picture Oscar isn’t out of reach. Reviews this good usually mean that it will stay in theaters for at least a month and then move on to the second-runs. After the Golden Globe nominations are announced in December, and a month or so later, the Oscars, the first-runs sometimes pick up the nominees again. I have some good foreign distributors too, and I’m confident that Bourbon is going to be a hit overseas. Foreign audiences love films about American tragedies. Our tragedies make their own, which are often worse, seem a little less terrible. There is also so much poetry in sadness, a very different and possibly more potent variety than the kind of poetry you find in happiness.
After Elise, Marek, and I went to the premieres in New York and Los Angeles with a number of other Bourbon people, we flew to London for the UK premiere, and afterward we had dinner with Mick Jagger, whom I’d met when we’d worked on a picture together several years earlier. Jagger is very worldly, self-possessed, and witty, and that night, he could not keep his eyes off Elise. I told myself that I should be used to this by now, but it’s hard for me to watch other famous men ogling her, especially if they are both a rock legend and a legendary womanizer.
Sometimes I think that I’d be happier if I broke it off with her and went out with a woman closer to my age, one who isn’t an actress, but I cannot see myself giving her up. I can’t imagine meeting another woman as beautiful, talented, and sweet-natured. Maybe two of the three, but no more. We’re either together until I die, or she will have to be the one to dump me.
Belle’s calls were arriving less frequently by the time Bourbon was released in the States, and Elise was in better spirits than she had been for a while, so we had a good time in England. But a week after the UK premiere, Elise had to leave for three weeks in Montreal for a new project, then two more in upstate New York before she’d be back in Los Angeles, where they’d wrap the film after one final week on a Paramount sound stage. I was going to be away for a few weeks too, doing a role in a French film that Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the genius behind Amelie, was directing. Aesthetically, we’re pretty different, but I love his films and he apparently really liked Javier’s Sons and The Zoologist and now Bourbon. When he approached me with the role for The Hypnotist (L’Hypnotiseur), it seemed a safe bet that we’d work well together, provided I let him do all the directing, which admittedly is getting harder as I get older. I often visualize how I’d shoot a scene instead, or how I’d have written the dialogue, and this causes me something like physical distress. I’m definitely not the first person this has happened to—Clint Eastwood is someone who again comes readily to mind, and Paul Newman, two fine actors whose directorial projects often worked out too. No matter what, it’s hard to take orders, especially when you think you’re smarter or more creative than the boss (which I suspect a lot of people do).
E. J2 REDUX
Something happened just before I left for Paris to work with Jeunet that I’m not proud of. Elise was about to finish up in Montreal and head to New York, and we were using Skype to visit with each other nightly, unless she had a late shoot, and then we’d try to talk earlier. One afternoon when I had nothing scheduled that I couldn’t postpone for another day or two, I ducked out to see a movie, a five p.m. matinee that I hoped wouldn’t have a lot of people in it, and if I timed it right, I’d be able to slip in after the previews had started and no one would notice me. It was a German movie about a man who takes a vow of silence for a year, moves out to a remote farm in Bavaria, and tries to figure out why the Holocaust happened and then write the defining book about it. When I got up after the credits rolled, a little dazed by the film’s sorrowful intelligence, I ran into someone I knew in the lobby. Seeing her there, as if conjured out of a daydream with her pretty short yellow skirt and flowing white blouse, I felt this sudden, almost sinister desire rise up from the pit of my stomach. This lovely girl was my son’s most recent ex-girlfriend, Danielle, and we hadn’t seen each other since last fall, not long before she broke up with Billy. The final time that I saw them together, I got a little drunk on champagne and kissed her good-bye right on the lips. I’m pretty sure that she and I both enjoyed it more than we should have, and I’m also pretty sure that one of the reasons I kissed her was because I was still very angry with Billy over that f*cking poem he gave to Elise last fall, hardly more than a month after she and I had first gotten together.
The whole time Anna, Billy, Danielle, and I were together that night at Sylvia’s, listening to the house band blow blue notes into the electrified air, I felt sorry for Danielle, knowing what I did about my son’s behavior in New Orleans, and how it was very unlikely that she had much of a clue about what he’d been up to there. I knew that it wasn’t my place to tell her, and I didn’t, but I liked Danielle and had enjoyed seeing her the few times we’d all gotten together. She had always seemed smart and kind, a girl my son was lucky to have in his life. I can’t say that about all of his girlfriends. One of them, a rail-thin performance artist he’d dated in college, had offered me a blow job at Billy’s graduation party. Another had also offered sex in exchange for an introduction to a director I was working with at the time.
For the record, I turned them both down. But I did not turn down another offer that I should have ignored too—one made by one of my daughter’s closest friends. I did not turn around and walk away when I knew what she was about to do—she was lying by the pool in my backyard, facedown on a lounge chair, her bikini top untied. I knew before she did it that she would rise up and show me her perfect seventeen-year-old breasts. I knew that she would do it because Billy was staying at his mother’s house, and Anna had just left to pick up carryout at an Italian place five miles away. Jill sat up and gave me the kind of smile that’s impossible to misinterpret, and we went into the cabana where I sometimes took naps or changed into my swim trunks. We locked the door and lay down on the sofa beneath the windows and almost before she could pull off her bikini bottom, I had my face between her legs, tasting the chlorine on her cunt, the salty sweetness beneath it, and then she climbed on top of me and I went for it so hard that I think my teeth were bared, scarcely managing to pull out in time, even though she swore that she was on the pill. It was all over in about seven or eight minutes. She wanted to do it again, wanted to sneak over whenever I’d let her, but after a few more times, I told her that we had to stop. I didn’t want Anna to find out because I knew that she wouldn’t forgive me. I knew this in part because Isis told me, but I also knew my daughter—she has a stronger moral compass than anyone I’ve ever met. This is what I thought, in any case, until I met her married lover a couple of months after Bourbon’s release.
When I saw Danielle after the matinee, I didn’t behave as well as I should have then either. It was such a surprise and an almost unconscionable pleasure to see her that I didn’t want to let her go. I hadn’t made any dinner plans, and after the power of that melancholy German movie, I wasn’t ready to go home. Elise had a night shoot, and I knew she wouldn’t be expecting me to call her on Skype at eight, eleven o’clock her time. After Danielle and I hugged each other hello and she shyly kissed my cheek, I asked her out to dinner.
Her face flushed. “Do you really have time?” she said. She sounded a little breathless. I think, as early as this moment, that I had already made up my mind about what the night would hold.
“Of course. I’m free as a bird.” I laughed, a little embarrassed. “Sorry about the cliché. They slip out sometimes.”
“I saw your new film,” she said. “I think it’s just terrific. Actually, I saw it twice. It’s even better than they say. I’ve been telling everyone I know to see it.”
“Thank you, Danielle,” I said. “That means a lot. While we were working on it, I had a feeling that things would turn out all right.”
“It might be my favorite movie, ever.”
I wanted to put my arms around her again, but I didn’t. “You don’t have to say that.”
“It’s true,” she said. “It’s amazing.”
We walked out to my car, which I had parked behind the theater. I was hoping we wouldn’t be stopped by anyone asking for an autograph, but about four yards from the car, we were. I signed a paper bag from Whole Foods that a woman and her daughter presented to me, both of their faces so bashful and happy that I didn’t really feel too irritated. Danielle stood a few feet away and waited for the girl to take a picture with her phone of her mother and me and then I posed for one with her and finally we were done and I got Danielle to the car and realized that it might be better to go to my place and order in so that we didn’t have to worry about other interruptions. “If you don’t mind?” I said. “Is your car here? Do you want to follow me to my place?”
“We could go to my place too,” she said. “I only live about a mile and a half from here.”
She lived in Hollywood, just off Hollywood Boulevard, in a new building with a lot of windows, and when we got inside her apartment, I was impressed. There was no clutter anywhere, and she had spent time and money on the decor—sand-colored walls, large windows, tall lamps, a refrigerator with glass doors. I felt like I’d stumbled upon a meadow in the middle of a forest—everything had been crowded and close, then in a second, it all opened up and brightened. Another effect of her beautiful, clean place was that I no longer felt too guilty about being alone with her. I felt unencumbered and relaxed. “This looks like one of the apartments you see in those Scandinavian design catalogs,” I said.
“You really think so?” she asked, blushing. “I tried very hard with this place because it’s my job. I don’t know if you knew that I earn my living by reorganizing other people’s homes.”
I nodded. “I remember. You did a wonderful job here.”
“Thank you.”
Neither of us mentioned Billy. The entire night, neither of us said his name. I think I said “my son” or “my kids” once or twice, and Danielle probably said “him,” but we didn’t talk about Billy or their breakup directly. I didn’t mention Elise either, though Danielle probably knew that I was still seeing her. News of our relationship continued to appear in the gossip columns and entertainment magazines, and I think Danielle read some of them, because as many people in L.A. read them as anywhere else, whether they would admit it or not.
We ordered Mexican, and it was delivered after we’d already drunk a bottle of white wine. We were sitting on her leather sofa, looking out the west-facing windows, where the sun had just set. Eight stories below, the streets pulsed with traffic and possibility and the desperate energy of a million dreams not coming true fast enough. She had put on some Nina Simone and we had slipped off our shoes and she was listing toward me and I was already half hard when I leaned in and kissed her. She let out a little cry and fell against me, her arms snaking around my neck, and I knew with the libidinous, cunning certainty that lives just below good manners and good intentions that we would not stop. Her breasts are fuller than Elise’s and her hips rounder. She has a womanly body, more soft than Elise’s, but not at all fat, and when I was moving inside her there on the sofa, she came so fast that it thrilled me speechless. She was so beautiful, a true grace note of my recent life, and yes, so was Elise our first time and many times after that. That I could do what I was doing while being in love with another woman is the kind of mystery that seems to bewilder and appall so many of us, even though it happens all the time. The body acts, and the mind tries to rationalize it. Danielle is a knockout and so is Elise. There are a lot of beautiful girls in the world, and sometimes when you’re close to them, you don’t know how you’ll act.
We let the food congeal on her kitchen table and had to reheat it when we finally ate at midnight, the witching hour, and I should have been home alone in my bed, sleeping the sleep of the innocent, but this wasn’t who I was and hadn’t been for many years.
I didn’t leave her place until almost three a.m. She wanted me to stay, but I knew that in the morning we would feel uncomfortable and have a hard time looking at each other, the realization that we had done something dishonorable, or rather, that I had done something dishonorable, rushing toward us with the usual destructive speed of regret.
Before I left, I asked her about the German movie, not sure why we hadn’t talked much about it earlier—mutual nervous preoccupation, I suppose. “What did you think of The Black Forest?”
“It made me cry,” she said softly. “I loved it.”
“I’m glad you felt that way. I did too.”
At the door of her apartment, after kissing her good-bye for a long time, I said, “I’ll call you, Danielle.”
I meant it, but I wasn’t sure how or if it would be possible. “Good,” she said. “Because I really want you to.”
Something I’m sure of: you do not know yourself as well as you think you do. Along with the J2 entry about the slipup with Danielle, one of the other entries I’d recently made had to do with the resurfacing of a fixation that I’d hoped had been eradicated with the help of my shrink.
When Billy was still in college and flew over to India to help me work on a shoot, I had a dream that he wasn’t my son, and it was so vivid, I felt that it might be true. I also thought that maybe our often-rocky relationship was due to the fact he wasn’t actually my flesh and blood. Even though we do look a bit alike, I was almost convinced that he had been switched in the hospital nursery by some absent-minded nurse, or maybe Lucy had screwed around on me and had had some other guy’s child, but the former seemed more likely than the latter because Lucy was not the type. When I asked Isis what the truth was, she claimed that the messages were mixed—some of her spirit consultants said that Billy was my son, others said that he wasn’t.
When I got home from India, I got hold of Billy’s baby book and removed the piece of his umbilical cord and put it in an envelope that I planned to take to a lab where my own DNA sample would be taken and Billy’s paternity would be determined once and for all. It wasn’t too hard to find a discreet lab to work with (in fact, I was surprised by how many labs offered paternity tests—not exactly reassuring), but when I was on my way there, a UPS driver rear-ended me while I was waiting at a stoplight, and it seemed that this was God’s or some other big spirit’s way of telling me that I was being a huge a*shole.
Yet ever since all of the bullshit with Billy in New Orleans last fall, I have been thinking that maybe I should take his umbilical cord to the lab and determine once and for all if I really am his father. If I’m not, I might sever ties with him (Lucy would never speak to me again though, I’m sure). I’d be able to stop pretending that everything between Billy and me is fine. He could keep his trust fund, and I would do my best to step out of his life. It might even be a relief to him. It’s quite probable that it would be.
I went on with these thoughts in J2 for a number of pages, but the conclusion I finally came to was that it doesn’t matter in the end if he’s my biological son or not because I have raised him as if he were. Based on this alone, he is my son.
F. A GENTLEMAN AND A THIEF
This young guy I know from Sony who was in a class or two with Billy at UCLA—a nice enough kid, I thought, before I caught him in my dressing room several months ago, about to lift my sunglasses—somehow found the balls to ask if I’d let him interview me for a documentary he hopes to make about me and a couple of other actors who have worked with foreign directors. He said he wants to look at some of the differences between our American and foreign roles and make the argument that Europeans are less afraid of progressive tactics like continuous takes and extreme close-ups and allowing actors to write their own lines like Mike Leigh does (but only after a lot of discussion with his cast about each scene’s goals), and Europeans also focus a lot more on character than plot. Hardly a revolutionary argument, but I was curious about what this kid would come up with and I told him that I’d give him the interview if he let me approve how he used my footage.
We taped the interview up at the Griffith Observatory, early in the morning before it got too hot and too many people showed up to walk the trails. I go there to run or hike sometimes, with George, my driver, joining me if I browbeat him enough because he spends too much time sitting when he’s on the clock. I planned to get in a run after the interview if it wasn’t too warm of a day. The kid, Jim Marion, was so nervous and grateful that I actually showed up that I almost had to laugh. I didn’t mention the day I caught him in my dressing room because we didn’t need to revisit that scene, and when he started to bring it up, I held up my hand and said, “Stop. Ancient history.”
“I just wanted to say that I know how it must have looked. I really was—”
“Jim, like I said, ancient history. Ask me your first question.”
“Okay,” he said, pressing a button on his little handheld camera. “How was it, working with Jean-Pierre Jeunet? I heard that you were just over in France acting in his new film.”
“It was a lot of fun,” I said. It really was. As with Amélie, Jeunet filmed more than half of The Hypnotist in the Montmartre neighborhood of Paris where he lives with his American wife, who is a film editor. Every morning while I was there, all the mornings I’ve ever been there, probably, I had a delicious café au lait and a chocolate croissant that the hotel brought in from the bakery next door. So many things are made or designed with such patience and care over there. I love all of the sounds in the streets too—the motorbikes that whine like wasps; the people calling to each other in mellifluous French, laughter often following; the way high heels clack against the old cobblestones. French women take good care of themselves and dress very stylishly; they also have an attractive briskness about them that most American women do not. There was always something or someone beautiful to look at. I just wish that I could speak more and better French.
“Can you tell me a little bit about his process?”
There were a few yellow jackets buzzing around us, but I tried to ignore them, sure they would follow us if we moved. “Jeunet is a perfectionist, but he was polite when I wasn’t doing exactly what he wanted me to. We had to do a lot of takes for several of my scenes, but he was so precise about what he wanted from everyone that I didn’t really mind. I’m sure I learned some things that I’ll use again.”
“Which foreign director have you liked working with the most?”
“They’ve all been great in their own ways. I don’t play favorites, so please don’t ask me to name any.”
Jim waved away a yellow jacket, which made me nervous. I had a feeling that one of us was going to get stung. “What about Polanski?” he asked. “What was it like working with him?”
“He’s very professional, very smart and funny too.”
“What did you think about what happened with that girl he allegedly raped and drugged back in the seventies?”
This wasn’t the first time I’d been asked that question. I had my answer ready. “It was unfortunate for him and everyone else involved. He was still recovering from Sharon Tate’s murder and the loss of their unborn child. I’m not saying he should be excused, but he wasn’t behaving in a rational way, and I bet he’d say the same thing if you asked him.”
Jim looked down at a small piece of paper he had in the hand that wasn’t holding the camera. “What do you think are the main differences between foreign and American directors?”
I laughed a little. “That’s a pretty broad question. There are plenty of differences just among American directors, don’t you think? But I suppose one thing is that foreign directors don’t usually have enormous budgets like some American directors do, so I think there’s often a little less pressure from their studio and producers to do everything exactly the way the studio bosses say.”
“They have more autonomy?”
“I think some of them do. So if the picture does well, they get most of the credit. If it doesn’t, they also get most of the blame. But that part’s the same as here. When something tanks in the U.S., the director gets the lion’s share of the blame, but it might actually be his producers’ faults more than his own.”
Jim swatted at another yellow jacket. “Can you give me an example?”
I shook my head. “I’d rather not. But I’m sure you can find one if you do a little research.” I paused. “You’d better not get too pushy with that wasp. One of us is going to get stung.”
“I have that disease where you don’t feel any pain.”
I stared at him. “No, you don’t.”
“You’re right, I don’t.” He laughed.
What is this guy’s problem? I wondered, blinking with irritation. I was starting to feel a little warm too. The morning run probably wasn’t going to happen.
“Sorry,” he said. “Sometimes I say things that are supposed to be funny, but no one can tell that I’m joking.”
“Keep trying,” I said. “But only with the people who know you well.”
We talked for a few more minutes, until he’d used up the forty minutes I’d allotted for the interview. To my surprise, neither of us got stung.
When we shook hands in the parking lot, Jim looked at me for a long second and said, “Do you remember when you said to me in your dressing room, ’There’s a reason you’re the person you are and I’m the person I am’?”
Had I really said this? It sounded a little stupid, not to mention self-aggrandizing. “No, I don’t think I do.”
“You did, and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I wouldn’t be making this documentary if you hadn’t said it to me. I was working at Sony during the day and writing screenplays at night, and feeling this rage over why nothing was happening for me.”
“And because I said those words to you, you changed your life?”
“Yes, I did.”
I regarded him, not sure if he was making fun of me in some backhanded way. “Well, that’s good, I guess. I hope it works out for you the way you hope.”
“You’re a good person, Mr. Ivins,” he said, very solemn.
I shook my head. What was he going to try to sell me? “I doubt it,” I said.
“Everyone I know who works with you thinks so.”
I studied his face, his earnestness making me pause. “I’m sure that’s not the case.”
“You are a good person, Mr. Ivins. You wouldn’t have done this interview if you weren’t.”
You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t a good person. That “here” can be both literal and figurative. Have I made my career solely by showing up when and where I said that I would? Because that’s definitely a big part of what determines a person’s success. If you make a promise, you keep it. The trick is not to make the promises you can see yourself breaking. At least professionally, if not personally.
In France I kept thinking about the night I’d spent with Danielle, and when I finally called her about a week after I got to Paris, she sounded so happy that she almost started crying, or maybe she was crying but trying to hide it. I felt uncomfortable, hearing her small, girlish voice, the hope in it almost unbearable. “When are you coming back?” she asked.
“Probably in about two weeks.”
“Can you come see me?”
There was static on the line, the normally clear transatlantic connection failing us. “I’d like to,” I said, “but I’m not sure if I’ll be able to.”
“I could come to you.”
“No, it’d be better if I went to your place, if we do see each other. I’ll call you when I get back to L.A.”
“I haven’t told anyone what happened.”
“I don’t think it would be a good idea if you did.”
“I’ve had a crush on you since I was twelve.”
“Well,” I said, looking up at the stucco ceiling of my hotel room. “You’re sweet to say that.”
“The whole time I was with Will, I wanted to be with you instead.”
I think I winced when she said this. But something in me also unfurled. It might have been relief or maybe even exultation. “I’ll try to call you when I get back.”
I told her then that I had to go, and she was quiet for a second before she said, “Are you still with Elise Connor?”
“Yes.”
She hesitated. “It would be okay if you saw us both. I think I could live with that.”
“Danielle, I’m sorry, but I have to go now.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Good-bye,” I said.
I waited a few seconds, but she didn’t say anything. Finally, I hung up.
Isis has mimicked Jim Marion’s phrase but has applied it to Danielle: she is, apparently, a good person too. She is not someone I should mess with unless I have serious intentions. I know this, but I do not know what I am going to do. About Elise, Isis has said that there is great potential for us, but it might not be in this life. I have tried to ignore this prognostication, and after she made it, I didn’t talk to her for several weeks. But it won’t go away; like the thought of my death, it burns in my private heart with a tiny, brutalizing flame.
G. FALLING
All summer and part of the fall now too, my daughter has been having an affair with a married man. He is one of the attending physicians at the UCLA Medical Center where she’s doing her internship. I know this because she invited me to join them for dinner at her house, and I brought Elise along, not knowing at first what I was getting us into. Anna tried to pass off the doctor as a friend, but there was such a strange and powerful undercurrent between them all night that I knew there had to be more to the story, and of course there was. She seems to be taking this affair very seriously too, probably, in part, because it is her first, and because it is in her nature to take such things seriously.
All during dinner, I could see her affection for this guy on her glowing face—new and carnal love, the kind that makes it difficult to sleep, but that doesn’t really matter because your body is releasing so many endorphins and so much adrenaline that you don’t need a lot of rest. But maybe what troubled me more than her modified state was that the doctor, Tom Glass, didn’t look much better off, even though he was wearing his wedding ring, brazen as the one rooster in the henhouse. My stomach dropped to my feet when I noticed it because at first I thought maybe he and Anna had eloped, but when I saw that she wasn’t also wearing a ring, I figured out pretty quickly why this was the case.
“What’s going on between you two?” I whispered to Anna in the kitchen while she was getting ice cream and ladyfingers together for dessert. “I know you and that man out there are more than friends.”
She gave me a look that I had never seen before, at least not on her pretty face. Amused scorn—this is what I’m almost certain it was. “We’re friends,” she said. “But if we were more, I don’t think you’d be the one to judge.”
I bristled. “So you are more than friends?”
“Dad, please, they can probably hear us.”
Elise was laughing in the other room. I really doubted that they could hear any part of our conversation. “Don’t be silly. I can barely hear us,” I said. “Why is he wearing a wedding ring?”
“The usual reason,” she said. She handed me two bowls, each with a ladyfinger slanting up from a scoop of chocolate. “Would you take these in to Elise and Tom?”
“If you’re working with him and having an affair, you could both be fired.”
She gave me a disappointed look. “He wanted to meet you. He thinks you’re great. He thinks you and De Niro are the two best actors in the world. Please don’t get upset. There’s no need to. Everything’s fine. Really, it is.”
“Where’s his wife? Why isn’t she here?”
“She’s playing bridge.”
“Bridge?” I said. “How old is she, seventy-five?”
She ignored this. “Her father used to teach it at the community center in Newark where she grew up. I guess she’s very good.”
“Does she know you two are friends? That he’s over here meeting Elise and me tonight?”
“Dad, please. Can’t we just have dessert and enjoy ourselves?”
So she was already a doctor, already in charge, like her mother had always been.
I took the ice cream into the other room and set a bowl in front of Elise and another in front of the doctor. I tried to smile, but despite my purported skills as an actor, I wasn’t able to move my mouth convincingly and the doctor gave me a wary look. He was no fool. He had probably worked with his share of terrified liars, patients who don’t want to admit to the symptoms they are pretty sure will spell their doom. Or other doctors who pretend they haven’t made the mistakes they’re being accused of. Malpractice, malignant, malign, malingerer. Mal as in evil, bad, dangerous. I didn’t think that Tom Glass was evil, but I really did not want him calling my daughter, having sex with her, or worse (from her point of view, anyway), canceling the occasional tryst when she was so looking forward to seeing him—because his wife had changed her plans for the day, or one of his kids had broken his wrist, or his mother-in-law had dropped by unexpectedly. He had someone to sleep next to at night. My daughter did not. She had only his word, the next promised assignation, and she must have known by now that a rendezvous wasn’t a given until he stood directly in front of her, clothes on their way to the floor. It all made me feel ill. I knew this man. I was this man. And of course my daughter realized this too. What could I really say to her? Even so, I didn’t care if my displeasure seemed a double standard to her. I wanted to protect her from disappointment, from unfortunate or foolhardy choices. I did not want this walking midlife crisis with his MD and smooth talk to break her heart.
But part of me, I have to admit, liked him. He was funny, intelligent, respectful, at least in front of Elise and me. He was probably a very good doctor and a good teacher. He spoke with confidence but not arrogance. He laughed easily. He looked at Anna with admiring eyes, and I could see why she had been drawn to him. He might even have been thinking about leaving his wife for her, but did I want Anna to be the other woman who managed to steal the husband away from his wife and kids? I was pretty sure that I did not. He was also so much older than she was. If she wanted kids of her own, I had to wonder if he would oblige. If he should oblige.
Elise had a good sense of what was going on too, and when we were in the car heading back to her place, she looked at me and said, “That must have been a little strange for you.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, Renn, let me see,” she said, laughing a little. “Because you left Anna’s mother for another woman, and now it looks like Anna is playing the same role that Melinda did for a while.”
Playing a role. I don’t like that expression when it’s not being used to talk about filmmaking. Life is real; it adds up to something. Yet I understand why we say it all the time. Real life is also surreal in a way that movies are not. One of the reasons I wanted to be an actor was because the best movies felt so much more important to me than my own day-to-day life. Now, ironically, they are my real life.
“It was a little awkward,” I admitted. “I think Anna knows that I’m worried about her.”
“He’s very nice though.”
“Yes, he seems to be.”
“Anna’s a year or so older than me, isn’t she?”
“Yes.”
She was silent.
“Why do you ask?” I said.
“Has she given you a hard time about me?”
“No, she hasn’t.” In fact, she had made a few comments about our age difference, but I didn’t feel like telling Elise. It would have hurt her feelings and she might have gotten upset, and there was no reason for her to feel that way. It wasn’t like I would break up with her if my daughter didn’t approve, but Elise certainly had cause to break up with me. I had seen Danielle after my return from France and had had sex with her, and I wanted to do it again. I knew that if I continued to see her, it would end badly, but I wasn’t yet ready to stop. It was likely to end badly no matter what. I did not want Danielle to tell me that she was in love with me, but because I have a hard time being a hardcore a*shole, I brought her a couple of gifts back from Paris—a little keepsake box filled with handmade chocolates, and a necklace with a tiger’s-eye pendant that I’d found in one of the antique shops on the Left Bank. I bought Elise presents too, five of them. I spent a lot of money on them both, but more on Elise.
My favorite role, I suppose, is the romantic. It’s one that I play well, though romantics are dangerous—to themselves and to their lovers. Sometimes it’s only their stupidity that makes them dangerous. But often it’s also their selfishness.
A final note. About a week after I met Elise’s married boyfriend, I got a call from Lucy, Anna and Billy’s mother, saying that Billy was in the hospital. He’d been taken in because he had collapsed when he was out running earlier that day. He was dehydrated and hypoglycemic, and had apparently been out running something like twenty or thirty miles on the streets and trails near the Rose Bowl without enough water and no energy bars. A couple of other runners found him, probably not long after he collapsed. One of them had a cell phone, and they might have saved his life by moving him into the shade and getting him to swallow some water before the paramedics arrived and took him to the hospital.
I went to see him that afternoon, as soon as I could leave a meeting about a film I was hoping to direct and play the lead in starting in January, and it was only the third time since his ill-fated trip to New Orleans that I had seen my son. About a year had passed since the episode with the poem, and we still hadn’t talked about it, at least not in any meaningful way. No truce had been reached, neither of us having bothered to extend anything like an olive branch, and there I was, f*cking his ex-girlfriend on the sly now too. When I went to the hospital to see him, I wondered for a panicked second if Danielle might be there, if Lucy had called her too, but I told myself that everything would be all right if she was. It wasn’t like I had shot and killed someone. We were all adults, capable of making our own decisions, as unwise as they might occasionally be. Elise was working, but I wouldn’t have brought her along even if she had been free. I hadn’t called her on my way to the hospital to tell her what had happened to Billy. To be frank, I wasn’t sure when I would tell her.
Lucy was in the room with Billy when I got there. Anna was too. They had attached an IV to his right hand. He looked exhausted and was sunburned. But he was conscious and alert, and I felt a rush of overwhelming relief, as if I had just opened a window after a very long time of no light or fresh air. I went over to the bed and smoothed the hair back from his forehead. “I’m so glad you’re all right,” I said. “I hope you’ll take it easier from now on.”
Billy’s voice was hoarse when he spoke. “I will, Dad. I don’t know what happened. I go out all the time with only one bottle of water and usually I’m fine.”
“You have to stop that,” his mother said. “And you need to stop running so far, especially if it’s hot outside like it was today. You’re so thin, and if you’re not going to drink enough water either, I’m going to have to hire a detective to keep an eye on you.”
Lucy was wearing a pair of gray slacks and a white blouse with pearls. She had probably just come from the clinic after a day of seeing children with asthma and food allergies and ear infections. She looked tired but pretty, her light brown hair frosted almost blond now, and she had stayed in shape from sheer nervous will and treadmill runs at six a.m. five days a week. I hadn’t seen her in over a year, maybe two, but it didn’t feel like it had been that long. I went over to hug her, and then to our daughter, who smelled like something I couldn’t quite place, but later I realized it was the brand of cologne that her attending physician had been wearing the night we met for dinner.
“Mom, I run almost every day, and this has never happened before. I did three half-marathons and four ten-mile races over the summer. I’m signed up to do the marathon here next March too.”
“You are?” I said, impressed.
“Yes. It’ll be my first.”
“Wow. That’s ambitious. Good for you,” I said.
His mother, however, was not impressed. “Billy, I don’t know. Marathons are so hard on your body. And you don’t eat enough.”
“I’m fine, Mom. I love running. I’m good at it.”
“Says the dangerously dehydrated guy from his hospital bed,” said Anna.
Her brother rolled his eyes but said nothing.
“Do you want me to go to In-N-Out and get you a burger and fries?” I asked. “Or there’s a Carl’s Jr. just a couple of blocks away. Whatever you want, I’ll go get for you. You need to get some hearty food in your body.”
Billy shook his head. “I don’t eat red meat anymore.”
Anna stared at him. “You don’t? Since when?”
“Since May. But I still eat chicken and fish.”
“I hope you’re getting enough protein,” said Lucy.
“Most people get too much protein,” said Billy.
“That’s true,” said Anna.
“It is?” I said.
Anna nodded. “Yes, and it’s hard to digest if you eat too much of it. That’s one of the reasons why there are so many gastrointestinal disorders in our country. We eat more meat than we need.”
“We eat too much gluten too,” said Billy. “I’ve cut out a lot of bread products from my diet.”
“Why?” said Lucy. “You’ve never had a weight problem.”
“That’s got nothing to do with it, Mom. I just want to be healthier.”
“You’re not going to be healthier if you’re starving yourself.”
I looked at the three of them, these people with whom I had shared a house and a life until I thought I could do better. I wouldn’t say that I regret the divorce, but I do regret causing them the unhappiness and bad feeling that I know I did. I regret missing so much of my children’s adolescence. I also regret that Lucy hated me for a while, and that she hasn’t remarried or found someone to live with who makes her happy. Maybe she is happy on her own, but I think she could probably be happier.
“I’m sorry,” I said, looking from Billy’s face to the outline of his skinny body beneath the hospital sheet. He really had become a lot thinner since I’d last seen him, which had been in April on my birthday. Elise had been in Dallas, visiting her sister and parents again, which is probably why I decided to meet Billy for dinner, something we’d always done on or near my birthday if I wasn’t out of town. When we met at an Italian place I like in Santa Monica, I could tell that he’d lost some weight, but he wasn’t as thin as now. He was probably twenty pounds lighter than his normal one sixty-five. His eyes looked bigger and his cheekbones were more pronounced; some would have called him gaunt.
Lucy looked at me. “Why are you apologizing?”
I could feel my face starting to grow hot. “I don’t know,” I said.
Anna and Billy were looking at me intently too. “I don’t know,” I repeated. “I just wanted to say it.”
“We’re all sorry,” said Lucy. “We’re all sorry, and then we die.”
“Mom,” said Anna. “Don’t be so dramatic.”
“I’m not,” said Lucy. “I’m only speaking the truth. Your father would agree, wouldn’t you, Renn?”
I looked at her for a long moment, and then I nodded. “Yes, I guess I would.”
In the hall, someone was pushing a cart with a screeching wheel, and when Lucy and Anna glanced toward the door, I looked down at Billy and he looked up at me, his face unreadable. “I’m sorry, Billy,” I said.
“I’m sorry too,” he said, and then he closed his eyes. I reached down to touch his hair, but he was lying so still that I lost my nerve.