Little Known Facts: A Novel (14 page)

A few months ago, probably to guilt her into visiting, Larissa’s mother sent her a copy of the newspaper from the small Wisconsin town where her family still lives. Larissa spent half an hour reading it, and before she tossed it in the recycling bin, she pointed out something on the last page. It was the town’s police blotter, laughably benign with its reports of bounced checks and littering citations and high-schoolers blowing off stop signs. There was also a small section that should have said “Stolen Goods,” but someone hadn’t proofread very carefully and the heading was printed as “Stolen Gods.”

“I wonder what gods were stolen last week?” Larissa said, chuckling. “What will their owners do without them? Will their goldfish start barking? Will their rosebushes grow legs and run off?”

I rolled my eyes but couldn’t help laughing. “You’re strange.”

“I hope whoever stole those gods knows what he’s gotten himself into,” she said. “Their phone bill alone will probably be enough to put him in the poorhouse. How much does it cost to call Mount Olympus or wherever it is they live?”

“And the grocery bill. Nectar’s expensive.”

“If you ever want to steal a god,” she said, looking at me intently, “make sure you consider the possible consequences. At least when you buy something, you get a receipt and can return it.”

She saved that section and taped it onto my refrigerator, a small gray square from Beaver Creek’s weekly newspaper that’s supposed to remind me to laugh, not to take myself too seriously. I’m pretty sure that she doesn’t know about the goods I’ve stolen because I’ve been careful about where I hide everything. I might only be a second or two away from getting caught every time that I take a hat or a shoehorn or a pair of cuff links from the set, but at home, it’s not hard to keep this business to myself. If I didn’t take these props, I wouldn’t be able to pay all of my bills each month—rent and student loans the worst of it. Hardly anyone tells you in film school that you’re not likely to make any money after you graduate, not for a long fucking time, if ever. Or if people do tell you this, you ignore them. It’s like getting married—you’ve heard how many couples end up filing for divorce, but you go ahead and get married anyway, thinking your marriage will be different. Maybe it will. But more likely it won’t.

In any case, there are worse things than stealing a couple of hats and cuff links to get by. And it’s not like I’m some slob who goes home and stares at the TV every night until it’s time to go to bed. When I’m not too tired and Larissa and I aren’t going out, I sit down at my desk and write for a couple of hours, and after several years of doing this, I have eight unsold screenplays. This has become one of those jokes you once thought were hilarious, but after telling it so many times, it’s turned rancid.

The three screenplays I like most are
Winter Equinox
(I realize there’s no such thing),
Old Growth Forest,
and
So Close to Home. So Close to Home
is the most autobiographical of any film I’ve written so far, and it’s probably also the one I’m most ambivalent about. The protagonist lives in a tiny apartment in one of the most complicated cities in the world, and he works with famous people who live in beautiful houses that a few of them earned enough money to buy before their eighteenth birthdays. Some of these people worry that they aren’t nearly as talented or as interesting as they’re supposed to be, and they go on to make unnecessary trouble for themselves and those closest to them. What they want in their secret hearts is simplicity—less clutter and more substance, both objects and people—but they’re not sure how to achieve either of these things. They’re often lonely and undereducated, superstitious, grudge-bearing, worried, and envious about how much publicity (which to them, equals love) their friends and competitors are getting for their latest projects. Even though they are actors, skilled at creating a facade, they cannot keep these feelings from glaring through from time to time.

Most days they speed from one highway to the next, from one lunch meeting or fitting or screening to the next, feeling like they’re missing something, that this thing, whatever it is, will always be missing.

I don’t have any solutions to their problems, but I love these characters. They are children inhabiting beautiful adult bodies. They are victims of their own appetites, but I suppose this is true of everyone. They will stuff themselves with junk before dinner or sleep with their friends’ wives or drive their cars over cliffs because they own ones they don’t know how to drive or else they are desperately lonely. Their nightmares are other people’s daydreams. At least, that’s how I’ve chosen to write it.

1.

When they met, one of the things she liked about him right away was that he let her finish her own sentences, even if she had to pause for a second or two to find the right words. She had worked with other directors who talked for or over her, putting words in her mouth, trying to convince her that she felt or wanted something that she didn’t. She hadn’t completed her senior year of college, and three years later she remained self-conscious about this omission, despite her successes in the “real world,” which was supposed to be where success counted most. Twelve credits stood between her and her diploma because she had permitted her acting career to preempt other responsibilities, but no one she knew considered this a foolish choice, except maybe her parents. If her decision to leave school hadn’t turned out so well, she could always have returned to Austin to finish her degree—if she didn’t get herself pregnant or become a drug addict or shack up with some deadbeat boyfriend who made her sell T-shirts (or herself) on Venice Beach—which were the sorts of things that she suspected her parents had initially feared.

Another thing about Renn that Elise had liked immediately was that he hadn’t tried too hard to impress her, not in the way she had become accustomed to men and boys doing over the past five or six years, ever since, as her sister Belle, three years older and ironically, much plainer, had declared, Elise had become “aggressively beautiful.” There were, she had to admit, few shortages or deficits in her life, except maybe for free time and privacy, a fact that, she had a feeling, would wear on her more in the future than it did right now. Her fame was still a novelty to her, and on some mornings she awoke and felt, unaccountably, like laughing: the knowledge that she had made it as an actress, that her fame and sudden affluence were not a mirage, dawning on her with the same pleasurable warmth that she felt when newly in love.

They had been filming in New Orleans for a little over two weeks when she and Renn became lovers. She had never before gone to bed with a man more than a couple of years her senior. She also hadn’t gone to bed with nearly as many men as some of her friends had either, despite the number of willing and sometimes pushy suitors she encountered. It was occasionally difficult to deflect with grace the passes a few of her admirers made, but she understood that she shouldn’t complain. If no one were coming on to her, she would likely miss the attention and wonder if something was wrong with her. Her mother had also set her straight on this topic, her words spoken softly but tinged with what sounded to Elise like scorn: “If you plan to be a movie star, you’d better be able to live with the good and bad attention you’re asking for. Just do your father and me a favor and don’t accept any roles that require you to take off your clothes. That way you’ll have fewer perverts stalking you.”

Perverts.
The word had always sounded comical to Elise, even more so when her mother said it, because it was not the kind of word she was in the habit of using. Her mother spoke with a pronounced southern accent, being a native Texan, but her father did not because he had been raised in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. (Elise had been told that she also spoke with a twang, but it was not as obvious as her mother’s. Still, it needed to be effaced for most of the roles she would play, if not all.) Mrs. Connor used words like
critter
and
britches
as naturally as a character out of a John Wayne movie. When Elise told Renn about some of the southern peculiarities in her mother’s speech, he had laughed. “Does she say it as in ‘too big for your britches’?” he asked.

Elise smiled. “She sure does. What else? Too tiny for your britches? Too pretty?”

“I bet she said that about me, if you told her about us.”

“You are too big for your britches. And too pretty,” she said, looking down the length of his unclothed body, one that had surprised her by being more muscular than she had expected. He was almost thirty years older than she was, and although he looked good in his clothes, she hadn’t been sure what would be lurking beneath them. They were in his room at the Omni Hotel; it was their second week together, and she was thinking that she might be falling in love with him. She wasn’t sure what he felt for her though, aside from lust, and it made her nervous. Was he considering their relationship a fling, destined to end as soon as they wrapped
Bourbon at Dusk?
He had talked about introducing her to his friends, and to his son and daughter (both older than she was), but maybe he had no intention of doing so. The age difference should have made her feel as if she had the sexual edge, but she felt as if the opposite were true—he might think her too immature and unworldly and already be very close to tiring of her.

“You don’t have to say that,” he said quietly, but his smile was so sincere and uncomplicated that she could see how much he liked hearing it. He was as keen for flattery as any of the other men (eight? or maybe it was nine—why was it that she couldn’t recall exactly?) she had been with by then.

“I know I don’t.”

“If you keep giving me compliments like that, I might have to marry you.” He laughed but then abruptly stopped smiling.

She couldn’t tell if he was serious. He’s an actor, she reminded herself. I really have to make a point of remembering this.

“We’ll have to see about that,” she said, burying her face in his neck, breathing in the scent of the lemony soap he had used in the shower before she had come to his room.

“I want a small wedding to go with my big cock,” he said solemnly.

She shrieked and pulled back, thrilled by his crudeness.

“It has to be small,” he said. “Otherwise my cock will get jealous if it’s not the biggest thing in the room.”

“You’re terrible,” she said, laughing.

“Yes, I am, so you’d better get used to it.” He squeezed her sides until she shrieked again.

“Shhh,” he said. “What will the neighbors think?”

2.

To Elise’s and everyone else’s minor amazement, Renn and his assistant director were able to stay on the production schedule for
Bourbon
that they had devised with their producers, but inevitably, at the end of the fourth week, events began to conspire against them. Renn’s personal assistant had to take a leave of absence due to a family emergency, and the cinematographer contracted a virulent strain of food poisoning from a plate of crawfish that laid him up for three days. On top of that, the costume designer’s assistant quit because his boyfriend broke up with him over the phone, and two hours later he had fled home to Long Beach in tears to try to convince the boyfriend to change his mind. There were twenty-four days left on the schedule and about forty-five more pages of the script left to shoot, and if any retakes were necessary, they would have to be done before the company left New Orleans. Building sets on a soundstage in L.A. would be prohibitively expensive, and Renn intended for everything to be shot on location anyway. This was very important, in his view, to maintaining the authentic atmosphere of the picture.

When he told Elise that he had asked his son, Billy, to fly in from L.A. and work as his personal assistant for the remaining weeks of the production, she had hidden her curiosity from Renn. Since moving to California, she had interacted with enough men around his age who pretended to an amiable camaraderie with some of the younger men they worked with, but on at least two occasions, she had sensed an undercurrent of vicious competition between the older and younger man, in one case, a father and son. She had been a psychology major at UT-Austin, and even before college had believed that her hunches about people were often correct. Most of the time, even among the wealthy and powerful people she now interacted with each day, little happened to prove her impressions too far off.

Billy arrived on
Bourbon
’s set on a windless, thickly humid Thursday afternoon. He was visibly exhausted, unsure of himself, very cute. She could tell that he was surprised and flattered when she told him that he looked a lot like his father. After the introductions, Renn was anxious to get the next shot under way and hadn’t kept Billy on the set long enough to have a real conversation with her or anyone else. She later learned that Renn had given Billy a time-consuming PR task (which Billy promptly forgot about, and hearing this later, she felt sorry for him, considering how tired he looked) and an off-site errand for him to do with George’s assistance, Renn’s driver, a taciturn, slow-to-smile man who gave Elise the creeps, but Renn had told her that he trusted George more than anyone else he had worked with over the past twenty years.

It wasn’t until a couple of days later that she and Billy had a chance to talk for more than a few seconds. Renn was conferring with her costar, Marek Gilson, about a crucial solo scene, and the crew was setting up the next shot. The heat was still oppressive, and she was resting in her trailer and thinking about returning a call from her sister, but she wasn’t looking forward to doing it because she thought that Belle wanted money but would not be able to ask for it directly, something that drove Elise crazy. Through the window she saw Billy walking by and got up to open the door and call out to him. In the glimpse she caught of his face before he could rearrange his features into nonchalance, she thought she spotted nervous excitement, and possibly joy. Her heart sped up a little, responding to his flattering happiness.