American Beauty (10 page)

“Hey! I thought you were going to the symphony.”

He ducked under the rope. “I ended up giving the tickets to a friend.” His eyes moved to Ben. “So. This is the guy, huh?”

“Umm, you just gave up your place in line,” Anna pointed out.

Caine gestured into the expansive theater. “I’m not worried. I’m going to
Best of the Best, Part Seven
, the karate movie. Somehow I don’t think this is a big chop-socky crowd.” He held out a hand toward Ben. “Hi, I’m Caine Manning.”

“Ben. Birnbaum.” Ben slipped a proprietary arm around Anna’s shoulders. “You two know each other, I take it?”

“Yeah, I’m her ex-husband,” Caine deadpanned. “What, she didn’t tell you about that? Or Caine Junior, either? The custody battle was a bitch.”

Anna laughed.

“Caine is my father’s intern,” she explained, hoping that would erase the scowl from Ben’s face, and praying that Caine wouldn’t mention Sam’s party.

No such luck.

“And occasional daughter-rescuer,” Caine put in. “Hey, I had a great time on the boat by the way. …”

Caine went on—it had been nice of Anna to invite him after Ben couldn’t help her out after her accident. “She told me all about you. You’ve got a great lady, there.”

Ben nodded and fixed his eyes on Caine’s heavily tattooed right forearm. “I didn’t know that Jonathan Percy was into hiring rockers.”

“Hey, we’ve all got our own thing. I like tattoos, rock ’n’ roll, late nights, smart ladies, and wise old men. Don’t hold it against me.” He leaned backwards on the heels of his black Converse All Stars. “So, I’ll get back in my line. Nice to meet you, Ben.” He ducked back under the velvet rope. “Gotta love Jackie Chan when he beats the crap out of the bad guys. Sublimates aggression better than
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
. You into Jackie Chan, Ben?”

“No,” Ben replied bluntly.

Their line edged forward. Caine pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of his wallet. “Man, they charge a mint for a flick these days, huh? It would be cheaper in Minnesota. But then I’d have to actually
be in Minnesota
.”

“Does he ever shut up?” Ben muttered under his breath, putting his arm around Anna as their line moved forward. “I have to say, there’s something about that guy that I don’t like.”

Well, I do like him, Anna thought. Besides, running into him is what got you to put your arm around me. Maybe a little competition isn’t such a bad thing after all.

The movie was good, really good, about an autistic boy who builds a toy rocket ship that he plans to ride all the way to Russia, and his peculiar friendship with an elderly Russian lady who was a neighbor’s housekeeper. Anna had found it touching. She’d found it even more touching when she’d glanced at Ben in the stadium-style seat next to hers and seen an actual tear roll down his cheek when the boy allowed the Russian lady to hug him for the first time.

That tear … It was just so … Ben. The Ben she knew. The Ben she was pretty sure she loved.

After the movie, they’d gone straight back to Anna’s house. The exterior was dark as they pulled into the circular driveway, since Jonathan Percy had left late that afternoon on an overnight to San Francisco—he had a dinner planned with his casino clients. Ben stopped the Mercedes by the front door. “So,” he began.

“So.”

It had definitely been a tense evening. Until the last couple of days, she and Ben had had an infinite number of things to talk about. Everything from family to literature, from their hopes for the future to their regrets about the past. True, when they’d first met on Anna’s flight to California, their attraction had been entirely physical. She’d found him incredibly hot, remembering the moment when he’d stood in the first-class aisle and pulled a Princeton sweatshirt over his head, revealing a V-cut body and rippling abs. There’d been plenty of opportunities since to indulge her admiration of that godlike form, but their connection had always been more than that.

“You liked the movie?”

She nodded. “A lot more than I thought I would.”

Uh-oh. Here they were again. two strangers talking. The French had a word for how it made her feel:
dépaysée
. Like being a stranger in her own country. She hated it.

One more try. She mustered what she hoped was a sexy smile.

“I’ve got a great idea. My dad’s out of town. Which means … the place is empty. So my question is …” She leaned over and kissed him seductively right next to his lips. “Are you coming in?”

Ben was out of the car and around to the right side of the Mercedes before she could get the door open herself. To her surprise, he picked her up and carried her to the front door. It was such an unexpected, romantic gesture. One part of her was thrilled. Another part of her was watching the part of her that was thrilled and decided it was almost excruciatingly corny. The thrilled part won out and kissed him. Then they both realized that he’d have to put her down to allow her to unlock the door, which made them both burst into laughter.

Once they were inside the mirrored foyer, Anna’s back was to the priceless Ming vase that was a replacement for the one she had carelessly broken her first night in Los Angeles. There was no danger of that happening now. They were kissing intensely, holding each other close. She was whispering how much she cared for him, how much she wanted him to carry her up the stairs to her bedroom. She had this dramatic vision from
Gone with the Wind
—a guilty pleasure she’d read between
Vanity Fair
and
The Portrait of a Lady
—of Rhett Butler doing just that to Scarlett.

Ben reached down and picked her up, just as easily as when he’d brought her inside the house. Then they were in the hallway, then in her room. She managed to reach the dimmer switch as they entered—soft yellow light bathed the cream-colored walls.

“You know,” he remarked, “I don’t know that I’ve ever been in this room before.”

He put her down gently and Anna watched him take it all in: the antique French bed covered with needle-point pillows, the matching nineteenth-century French teak furniture she’d ordered when she realized that this room in her father’s house would be her home for a while. The bookshelves were filled with all the classic literature she’d had shipped from Manhattan; her oversized oak rolltop desk was one that she’d purchased from an antique dealer in Los Feliz who didn’t want to part with it because he swore that F. Scott Fitzgerald had once been the owner. It held a Fujitsu LifeBook laptop with the monitor currently twisted to forty-five degrees, some notebooks, and a champagne flute filled with calligraphy pens.

“Whoa. That’s strange”

“What?”

“No media. Except for that laptop.” He smiled and pointed at her desk. “No TV, no MP3 player, no iPod, not even a clock radio. You keep it simple.”

Anna edged over to the dimmer switch and dialed it down a notch. “Yes. I do like to keep it simple. Sometimes.”

They kissed again. And again. A moment later, they were on her bed, which is where the weird night that Anna thought she was in the process of salvaging …

Ben rolled away from her.

“Umm,” he mumbled.

What the hell did
umm
mean?

“Is something wrong?” She sat up leaning on her elbows.

“No.”

Why was she certain his “no” meant “yes”?

“You don’t want to …”

She couldn’t bring herself to finish the sentence. It was too humiliating.

“We don’t have to have sex every time we’re alone.”

“You don’t want to make love to me?” Anna thought her voice sounded like a child’s.

“I love to make love to you. I really do.”

“Then why not … ?”

Her voice trailed off again, and she lay back down beside him, wondering whether she was being unreasonable. There was some truth to what he was saying—there was no law that said they had to have sex whenever they could. The night had been off-kilter from the start. On the other hand, there was also a chance that this was yet another sign that something had recently gone terribly wrong in their relationship.

She gazed at him—fingers interlocked behind his head, eyes closed—and then nestled into the warm place between his left tricep and chest. “Ben?”

“Yeah?” He didn’t open his eyes.

“Are we okay?”

He finally looked down at her. “We’re great. I mean it. I don’t want to be anywhere tonight but right here.”

Her eyes met his. “Okay, then.”

Yet Anna was anything but okay; his words had sent her brain into Anna Percy overdrive. Part of her believed him. If he was lying, it would have been just as easy for him to have made an excuse outside and left. Instead, he’d done his best imitation of Rhett Butler and carried her over the threshold. You couldn’t fake that.

Could you?

Dinner for One from L.A. Farm

T
he rail-thin doorman in the cobalt blue uniform peered dubiously at Sam through a pair of old-fashioned horn-rimmed spectacles.

“You say you’re Samantha Sharpe?
Jackson
Sharpe’s daughter?”

“No, I’m Ozzy Osbourne’s daughter,” she replied, voice dripping sarcasm.

The doorman nodded. “Knew it! You took off a few pounds—looking good.”

Sam gritted her teeth. Every time someone mistook her for a thinner Kelly Osbourne it made her insane. “Let’s try this again, shall we? I
am
Jackson Sharpe’s daughter. As in: let my people in the building, or you’ll be misidentifying celebrities in a really long unemployment line.”

He looked intimidated but still didn’t budge. “This is the most exclusive residence on Wilshire Boulevard. We have some famous people living here. Celebrities and such. I can’t let you in because you say you’re somebody, Miss.”

Oh for God’s sake. Yet Sam came prepared for occasions such as this. She dug into her pocketbook—Adobe Designs with Indian feathers and dragonflies hand-tooled into the mahogany leather, a recent gift from her dangerously young stepmother, Poppy, in the name of “family solidarity”—and found the clipping from the
Variety
story about the opening of principal photography on
Ben-Hur
. There was a photo of her and her father on the set, standing beside one of the old Roman chariots. The caption identified her as Jackson Sharpe’s daughter, Sam Sharpe.

“Consider this my photo ID,” she snapped, thrusting the clipping at the doorman.

He peered at the photo, asked if he could get her father’s autograph—like she somehow carried that around too—and hastily let her in.

It was after eleven o’clock on Sunday night, and part of Sam really couldn’t blame the doorman for giving her the third degree. He was, after all, the keeper of the gate of the Pinnacle West condominium building at the corner of Wilshire Boulevard and Comstock, one of the most exclusive buildings on the Wilshire corridor of high-rises that ran from where the 405 freeway crossed Wilshire practically to the ocean. Sam had always found this little stretch of condos in sprawling Los Angeles reminiscent of Miami Beach. If you wanted to live in an apartment, Manhattan or Paris were acceptable options. Who would do it in Los Angeles? Still, the condos in these buildings changed hands for low to mid-seven-figure sums, and there was no dearth of clients at Sotheby’s or even Coldwell-Banker to purchase them.

Eduardo lived in a condo, evidently owned by the Peruvian government, in this very building. Sam had never been to his place, but she’d managed to track down the information from a crisscross telephone directory on the Internet. Which condo unit was his, she wasn’t sure, because he still wasn’t returning her calls. She’d left plaintive messages, sweet messages, funny messages, and finally frustrated messages, none of which he’d chosen to answer.

Now, she’d had enough. It was okay for him to be mad at her—hell,
she
would have been mad at her, if she’d seen him do what she’d done on prom night—but it was time to get over it and, as they said in Hollywood, move on to another level.

She’d dressed carefully for a mission of persuasion: her most flattering Escada black velvet jeans with the silver rivets, a red cashmere Gucci V-necked sweater she’d bought at a trunk sale at the Shed restaurant in Santa Fe, and her favorite white-leather-and-crystal sandals from Jimmy Choo. Then she’d climbed into the black Hummer and buzzed over to his building.

“So, how’s the shooting going on
Ben-Hur?
” the doorman asked, hovering over her. “Word is your dad’s starting to go over budget.”

Christ, was
everyone
in this town in showbusiness?

Sam put her hand out without answering. “May I have the article back, please? And can you tell me if Eduardo Munoz is here?”

He nodded. “Now, what did you have in mind?”

“Some people need to get to Eduardo—it’s a little surprise I’m planning.”

Then he frowned. “I don’t know. …”

Sam pulled a few twenty-dollar bills from the back pocket of her jeans, having stashed them there just in case. She slapped them into his palm and curled his fist around the money. “Better?”

The doorman smiled and pocketed the money. “Much.”

“Good. Stand aside. You’re about to see genius in action.”

Eduardo was relaxing on his hand-tooled-in-Lima living room sofa, reading a book on the conflict in the Middle East, when someone knocked on the front door of his suite. Strange. The doorman always buzzed him if there were visitors. Maybe it was one of his neighbors stopping by.

He marked his spot with a red felt bookmark and went to the front foyer. Security in the building was so good that he had no worries about simply opening the door for whoever was knocking.

Three middle-aged men in tuxedos, with white towels over their right arms, stood before him. Between them was a silver room-service warming box on wheels.

“Eduardo Munoz?” the oldest looking of the three asked.

“Yes? May I help you?”

“Dinner for one from L.A. Farm,” the man continued. He consulted a small card. “Ceviche of arugula with beets, goat cheese, and pine nuts. Crispy Thai shrimp.
Loup de mer
in a white saffron sauce with snow peas. A cornucopia of berries and sorbet. And two different wines: a Chassagne-Montrachet ’87 for dinner, followed by a private-label Gewürztraminer with dessert. I trust this will be satisfactory.”