Jeff gave her a tour of the house, every room, and she couldn’t disguise her excitement at this being Brad Pitt’s house, at these being his things, and while she walked from room to room she no doubt imagined him inhabiting the house, walking from room to room himself, running lines or snorting lines or whatever it was that actors did with their days and nights. As she and Jeff walked through, looking at the same objects and spaces, each of them saw something completely different in this house that was not theirs, each of them walked not only through the physical edifice with its physical decor but also through a second house in the mind, an image of a house, the image that makes a house into a home, and in fact it was impossible to see the house accurately, it was impossible for both of them to see the same house, a condition that was only exacerbated by the emotionally charged overlays, hers excitement at finding herself in Brad Pitt’s home, his a negative form of nostalgia, a painful recollection of another time, which in and of itself consisted of he and G creating, cocreating, consciously and fictionally, what the house would mean to them, as if by agreement, so that they might, when occupying it, see the same thing for once, or as close as was possible for two separate individual consciousnesses to share the vision of a place.
Upstairs, in the master bedroom, Chloe oohed and aahed over the Jacuzzi tub and steam shower. She moved from one detail to another rapidly, with an energy he hadn’t seen at the gallery or restaurant. In his gut he felt G trying to assert herself over the territory, or his memory of G, as he untangled the synapses no longer corresponding to the real-world situation. He followed Chloe into the walk-in closet, prepared to hear more oohs and aahs—it was a massive closet, with an island in the middle, glass top, drawer for ties and jewelry—but she was silent. She hesitated for a moment just inside the closet. Jeff assumed it had stunned her into silence. He was right behind her. She turned around as if she’d decided she’d had enough, or for some reason couldn’t take anymore, as if the closet had exhausted or overwhelmed her. That was his immediate impression at her stopping short and turning quickly, before he’d had a chance to get out of the way, so that they were face-to-face, or almost face-to-face—he was slightly taller than she was. Before he could turn or step aside to let her pass, she took his wrist in her hand, tilted her chin up, and kissed him on the lips, not a peck, lingering there, parting his lips with hers, until the kiss transformed into a full-on passionate kiss, one hand still on his wrist, her other hand on the back of his neck, to ensure, it seemed, that he wouldn’t stop kissing her until she was done kissing him. Eventually she put both hands on the sides of his head and pulled away, locking her eyes on his.
“I got tired of waiting,” she said.
Her energy had changed again. She had kissed him, and he had kissed back. She seemed to have shed the excited, nervous energy she’d arrived with, the bouncing from one of Brad Pitt’s things to another, the mania with which she had seemed to be devouring the house with her eyes. Now they were on the same wavelength. When they kissed again, all the cognitive dissonance and G thoughts faded, and he simply wanted more Chloe.
33
“In the morning, I drove her to her car, which was still parked in the PaceWildenstein/Niketown lot. The overnight fee was staggering, I asked her if I could cover half, but she didn’t care. She had a cute little BMW, late model. I remember thinking USC, BMW, what am I getting myself into here? She didn’t seem to mind my old Volvo, though, which I took as a good sign that she was okay slumming it with me. It was only as we were saying goodbye that we realized we didn’t have a way to get in touch, so we swapped phone numbers.”
“As one does,” I said.
“So I’m writing down her number, and I ask her for her last name, and she asks me if I know a lot of Chloes. I say that she’s the only one. She says that, in that case, I don’t need her last name. She was very smiley, you know, flirtatious as she said this, and I could tell it was to cover up a degree of reluctance on her part. I start in with ‘What is it, Chloe Mussolini? Chloe Manson?’ Goofing off, making a bit of fun of her for holding back her last name but also burning with curiosity, especially because she’s not playing along. She looks genuinely worried at this point, no sign of the flirtatious Chloe. Honestly, I couldn’t figure out why. ‘How bad can it be?’ I said, and she said, ‘Don’t hate me.’?”
“Hate her?”
“That’s what she said.”
“Why would you hate her?”
“Well, turns out her last name is… Arsenault.”
“No.”
Jeff nodded. “She knew I worked for her father. She first saw me at the FAFA opening. She thought I was attractive, but she wasn’t going to approach me while I was working. She sort of just noted my presence. Then, when she saw me at PaceWildenstein, she felt like she’d been given a second chance, and she wasn’t about to pass it up. That was when she appeared next to me, looking at the Agnes Martin painting. She said she had to make sure, one, that I wasn’t gay, and two, that I could hold an actual conversation, and then, she thought, she would let me know, full disclosure, who she was. But she couldn’t seem to find the right time. She was worried it would make things weird, and she was having fun. Then, she went to my place, and we hooked up, and she knew she’d blown it by not telling me earlier, in fact she was on the verge of waking me up to tell me, but decided against it.
“So she had been keeping a secret from me from the start. But as soon as she divulged her secret, I was burdened with a secret of my own. It was as if she’d handed it off to me. I could see the burden lifted from her conscience. She’d kept her secret for one night. I’d keep mine, what? Forever?
“Reading my face she knew I’d been thrown off-balance. She had no idea how much. I kept having to remind myself that from her perspective it was only an awkward situation, an instance in which my job might be threatened. She sensed my reaction, my strong reaction, she had a good intuitive sense, and she worried that she’d blown it. She knew right away, she told me, how important the job was for me. And how much I feared her father—everyone did. I wasn’t alone in that. She assured me that we could keep ‘us’ secret, that she wouldn’t out me, that dating me had nothing to do with the fact that I worked at FAFA. That even if we split up, she wouldn’t narc on me.”
“Feared her father?” I asked.
“We’ll get to that. I listened to her reassurances and watched her face. I had thought that this thing with Chloe could be a new chapter for me, you know, whisk me away from the bundle of everything else, the loss of G, what happened at the beach, the whole Francis thing. I had fantasized that I might find my way out by filling my head and heart with something else. Was that a thought I’d had in the middle of the night, with Chloe at my side? That’s how I remember it. But then, to discover that what I had seen as my potential escape hatch had, through no planning or forethought on my part, led me right back to Francis?”
There it was again, no planning or forethought.
“I didn’t turn away. I could have easily and justifiably done it, given her some excuse, told her that I couldn’t risk my job by dating her, but the thing was, I liked her. I really did. This would not be a one-night-stand situation. That wasn’t my style.”
He shook his head, as if marveling at the vicissitudes of his own story.
“You kept seeing her?”
He nodded slowly.
“Our relationship developed under a cloud of paranoia. We ordered in rather than going out. When we did meet out in the world, we avoided anywhere that we might bump into anyone we knew. This might have seemed like overkill, but it was also fun, one of the games we played. A relationship needs its games—if there’s no sense of play, there’s only desperation, fear of being alone. I loved that we had a game, known only to us. Sometimes we rented movies, but more often, we talked. Since I was working full-time and she was on a student’s schedule, we usually ended up at my place, Brad Pitt’s house. Plus, at her place there was a roommate, a young woman I hardly ever saw, very studious, always cooped up in her room. One night while we were watching a movie in her living room, Chloe insisted that we have sex on the sofa. I went along with it, but I couldn’t help but think of her roommate, trapped in her room. I asked her whether the roommate was home, and she said that if she was, she wasn’t coming out now. This shocked me, you know, it seemed very inconsiderate. But I suppose she was a chip off the old block in some ways. After that night I avoided going to her place.
“Chloe was one of those people who go after everything they want, without hesitation and without calculating the potential challenges. Because that wasn’t something I did readily, I saw it as a sign of maturity rather than what it was, which was the result of a lifetime of entitlement.”
“She was spoiled.”
He laughed. “She wasn’t used to hearing the word no, I’ll put it that way. She moved through the world as if she would never have to.”