Little Known Facts: A Novel (11 page)

The fact that Jill has joked more than once that Anna must be attracted to him too is something she finds more irritating than perverse because in her private heart, she is unsure if, while watching his films and occasionally seeing him work on the set, her feelings have always been innocent. How not, from time to time, to see him as the man countless others desire? This is, after all, how he has managed to make a life as an actor. He has long been a sex symbol—several magazines over the years having baldly declared this fact on their covers, Anna rolling her eyes over this news even as she quietly wondered if she would grow up to marry a man like him. She does not want to think that Dr. Glass is this man, but he and her father are not very far apart in age, and he has power over her too; in some ways, even more than her father does. When this thought arrives, she hastily turns it away, but its traces remain, like light seeping from behind a closed door.

“Go out with Dr. Heart-of-Glass, Anna. I have a hunch that he’ll give you the finest medical attention you’ll find anywhere. Just go and have fun. If you fall in love with him, then you can worry.”

I might already be in love with him, she almost says.

“I was thinking that I might want to go out with that Jim guy you were telling me about last week. Do you think he’d like me?”

“I’m sure he would, but I don’t know if you’d like him.”

“Will you give him my phone number or e-mail? I really want to meet him.”

“He’d probably drive you crazy,” says Anna. “And I don’t want him hating me if things with you don’t work out. I’d still have to see him all the time.”

“I’ll be nice to him.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Yes, I will. At least for the first date.” She pauses. “Dr. Glass might fall in love with you too. Don’t rule that out.”

Her friend’s words make her breath seize. “I don’t think he will,” she says softly.

“Well, darling, you could be wrong.”

All week during her ICU rotation with two doctors who are related in some obscure way—the spouse of a cousin? the aunt of a nephew’s wife? Anna thinks of her impending date with Dr. Glass and tries to convince herself to call and tell him that her plans have changed or that she simply thinks they had better not. She could say that she really would like to get to know him better, but she knows her feelings for him are inappropriate, and surely he understands that she does not wish to compromise their professional relationship or intrude on his personal life?

But she doesn’t do it, doesn’t want to do it; it has been so long since she has felt as excited about a man, and despite her fatigue each night after the long hours at the hospital, she has gone out to buy a new skirt and blouse, along with a black silk bra and matching thong, these two items alone costing her a hundred and fifty dollars. The night before their date, she hardly sleeps, but in the morning finds that she doesn’t look tired, her anticipation having released floods of endorphins, hormones that keep her awake and almost fresh-faced, her cheeks pink, as if she has been out walking in the sun.

When she arrives at the restaurant at one o’clock, Dr. Glass is already there. He stands up from the table and takes her hand, not letting it go until he has pulled back her chair and motioned for her to sit down. She is so nervous that she has trouble looking at him, but his eyes seem to be steadily on her. “I have to think that you’re a woman of the world, Anna,” he says while they eat vegetable samosas and drink tepid tea.

She smiles, startled. “Why do you think that?”

“Well, in part because of who your father is.”

“You know who he is?”

“Of course. I think most people do.”

She looks down at the table, trying not to let him see her discomfort. She does not want to talk about her father. She does not want him to be present for any part of what she is probably going to do with Dr. Glass—Tom—which he has asked her to call him outside of the hospital. “My mother’s really the one who raised my brother, Billy, and me,” she says. “My father was gone a lot while we were growing up, and he and my mother got divorced when I was eleven.”

“But you still must have seen him when he was in town.”

“Yes, I did.” It isn’t strictly true that her mother did most of the parenting. She and Billy were with their father relatively often because they sometimes went where he was working during their school holidays, and when he was in L.A., they stayed with him on the weekends, Melinda, his second wife, babysitting them until they were old enough to take care of themselves, which was about the same time that he divorced her.

“Why didn’t you want to go into acting too?”

“I guess I didn’t have the guts.”

“You need more guts to be a doctor, I think.”

She laughs softly. “Yes, that’s probably true.”

“It is, Anna. Don’t doubt it.”

“My mother’s a doctor.”

He nods. “I remember you saying that during your first week with me.”

“I did?”

“Yes.”

“Do you mean my first week last year or my first week this year?”

“Last year.”

She looks at him, as pleased by this admission as anything he has previously said to her.

He hesitates. “One thing I feel I should say is that I don’t make a habit of asking my interns out.”

“I didn’t think you did.”

He regards her. “Have you ever dated one of your professors or attendings before?”

“No.”

“They were too shy to ask you, I’m sure.”

“I doubt it. But that’s fine, because I wasn’t interested in any of them.” She glances at his hand and sees that he is wearing his wedding ring. She wonders if he ever takes it off or if he has left it there to remind her that he belongs to someone else.

“But you are interested in me?” he murmurs.

She feels a nervous laugh bubbling in her throat. “Yes, but I know that I shouldn’t be.”

“Why not? Because I’m married?”

“That’s part of it.”

“Because we work together?”

“Yes.”

“I won’t name any names, but attending physicians go out with interns all the time. As long as everyone’s discreet, it’s not a problem. Some of my colleagues have married their former interns.” He pauses. “You don’t have to worry about my wife. She and I give each other a lot of breathing room.”

It seems likely that two or more of these statements are a lie, but Anna doesn’t challenge him. Her heart is beating so hard that she can feel it pulsing in her throat. She barely tastes the food they have ordered, and the sounds of other diners’ conversations filter into her ears but hardly register. She will never be able to tell her mother about Dr. Glass. It would be smart not to tell anyone about him, but she has already told Jill, and the day after their conversation, Celestine. One of the pleasures of behaving badly, she is beginning to realize, is how good it feels to have dirty secrets, and how hard it is to keep them to herself.

After their waiter brings the check, Dr. Glass looks at her (Tom, Anna reminds herself) and says, “If you don’t want to go back to your place today, we don’t have to. But if you do want to, I think that’d be nice.”

Is this how it’s done? she wonders, surprised by how naive she feels, knowing what she does about the rarefied plane her father inhabits, about the things that the people he works with sometimes do, how some of them have lovers in cities all over the world, how some have been treated for sex addiction, which has always seemed to her a surreal ailment to be “cured” of—how can one suppress the libido for the long term? It has never seemed possible to her. Instead, some people seem eventually to lose interest in sex, their hormone levels shifting, their habits and desires becoming uninteresting or possibly unpleasant.

“I’m not like my father,” she blurts. “I’ve never had an affair before.”

Dr. Glass stares at her, laughing a little in surprise. “I would never confuse you with your father, Anna. Please don’t think that. Working with you this past year, I think I have a pretty good sense of who you are.”

She looks at him. “You do?”

“For one,” he says, “you’ve never once mentioned your father or his fame.”

“It’s not something that I usually do.”

“I know.” He takes her hand from where it rests next to her plate and presses it to his lips. “I think you’re very lovely. I’ve never met anyone like you. You have so many things going for you, but you don’t ever seem to need to remind anyone of this.”

She has to look away from his earnest gaze. He is saying everything she wants to hear, but he doesn’t have to. She wants him, unequivocally, and within ten minutes they are at her house, the blinds closed, the radio clicked on so that they won’t have to hear her downstairs tenant walking around or talking on the phone with her windows wide open. Anna’s clothes are in a heap on the floor next to the bed, his draped over a chair. Even as she shivers with nervous desire for him, she can’t shut off her analytical mind. He put his shirt and pants over the chair so that they won’t wrinkle, she thinks. He doesn’t want his wife to wonder what he’s been doing, because of course she will be suspicious.

But then her mind does recede, or at least soften its cynical inquiry. Once his hands are on her breasts, his lips kissing the warm hollow of her neck, murmuring, “You’re so beautiful, Anna,” once the whole hot length of him is pressed against her shivering body, she knows that he is worth it, that whatever will happen, whatever expectations she will eventually have to forfeit, it is worth it to spend this hour with him, maybe two if he has the time to linger. She doesn’t know, can’t yet know, what he will be able to offer her. One of them will make most of the demands, she realizes, and it will probably become a pattern—the one asking, the other sometimes granting but often not. He will arrive at an appointed hour to undress himself and part her legs before getting into his car again and driving away until the next time she unlocks her door, behind which she has waited for him in something lacy and expensive. But right now, there is this first time, and it will always be the first time. She knows that she will remember it long after other details of this summer have faded. She will remember how he stepped out of his shoes and left them side by side next to her dresser, how he folded his pants over the chair before taking her into his arms and falling with her onto the cool, oceanic expanse of her bed.

At age twenty-eight, instead of being a promising young screenwriter who has just bought a custom-tailored tux for the Oscars, I’m a freelance propmaster whose biggest claim to fame so far is that Renn Ivins remembers my name when our paths cross during a shoot. This wouldn’t bother me so much if I thought that my screenplays were MFBS (masturbatory-fantasy bullshit), but they aren’t. They’re original, morally complex stories like Truffaut’s and Kieslowski’s, but I’m in Hollywood, not in France or Poland or even New York. Needless to say, no one gives a shit.

It could be that I don’t fit in here the way I should, despite going to UCLA and spending the last ten years of my life in southern California. Countless people, I’m pretty sure, live large portions of their lives within pissing distance of the 101, the 110, and the 405, but don’t ever really feel like they fit in. It depends in part on what you expect from your life—if you want to be rich and famous, this probably isn’t the best place to start, paradoxical as that must sound. You would probably be better off writing screenplays and making short films in Omaha or Minneapolis for a while and approaching Hollywood from an oblique angle instead of head-on like I did.

At eighteen, I showed up for freshman year at a big, sun-dried university in a place that wasn’t anything like the town between Ann Arbor and Detroit where I grew up. I brought along huge expectations with my extra-long twin-set sheet and new gym socks, and a long-distance relationship that, no surprise, went off the rails a few weeks before Thanksgiving. I liked many of the differences between here and home, but it wasn’t like the best film studios had their doors wide open, their sexy receptionists waiting to take me upstairs to see the executives with all the biggest stars on speed dial.

I thought college would be different from high school, filled with charismatic, friendly weirdos, but after a year or so of living in student squalor at UCLA, I realized that the rest of the world, Hollywood in particular, is no different from the tenth grade. It’s probably much worse, because the people in charge have real power. They decide who makes what films, and how, and these are the films that the rest of the world flocks to see. The studio executives, the directors and producers and marketing millionaires, many of them no more evolved than newly pubescent twelve-year-olds, are responsible for the images America beams out to the billions on the planet who aren’t Americans. That movie about the two idiots who can’t remember where they parked their car because they were too high the night before? This is the cinematic ambassador we deliver to the rest of the world, ninety minutes of Grade-D eye candy that forever corrupts the gray matter of twelve-year-olds in Tokyo or confirms the low opinion that the teashop owner in New Delhi has had of Americans ever since a group of fat, belligerent tourists from Hartford staggered into his shop and complained that his teacups were dirty.

I was in the drama club in high school, and instead of trying out for the plays, I stuck to the stage crew. I learned how to work hard, move quickly, and let the actors and director take the credit for a good production. Even at fifteen, I understood that all clubs have their ritual hazings, especially ones where members of both sexes find themselves in close, competitive relationships, an underpaid teacher barely in charge of the whole hormonal gang. A Hollywood movie set isn’t much different. I get most of my paying work for Sony, and it comes in more or less regularly, but it’s not like I’m flying to Maui every other month to spend time at my second home. There aren’t many union or guild jobs anymore for people who aren’t in front of the camera; like everywhere else, the movie industry is trying to make as much money as possible by spending as little as it can on production.