Little Known Facts: A Novel (15 page)

“Come in and put your feet up for a minute,” she said. “You can help me go over the lines for my next scene.” She had already memorized them but thought he might refuse, fearing his father’s wrath, if she didn’t have a good reason to invite him in.

He hesitated, smiling up at her. “Are you sure? I don’t want to bother you.”

“Don’t be silly. You wouldn’t be bothering me at all. But are you in a hurry?”

He shook his head and ascended the three metal stairs that led to her trailer’s door. She debated for a second about leaving the door open, not wanting to fuel any rumors that she was having an affair with both the father and the son, but the thought emboldened and irritated her. She shut the door, almost slamming it. If she wanted to have a conversation with the director’s son, innocent or otherwise, that was her business. They were adults, for Christ’s sake. “Yes, sweetheart, but people know you now,
a lot
of people, and they’re going to be watching you,” she could hear her mother querulously counseling her.

After Billy had come inside and sat down, she looked at him intently and said, “You really do look a lot like your dad. I hope you don’t mind me saying that.”

He shook his head. He was perspiring, the underarms of his green Lacoste shirt darkened by sweat, his hair dampened too. “I know you mean it as a compliment. I could do worse than look like my dad.”

“That’s for sure.” She paused. “Do you want some water? I have some in the fridge.”

“That’d be great,” he said, his eyes flitting to her face before he glanced at the window.

“You’re sure I’m not keeping you from something? I don’t want to make your boss mad.”

Billy opened the water bottle and took a drink. He started coughing almost immediately, his face reddening as his eyes filled with tears. “Oh God,” he choked out. “How embarrassing.”

“Keep coughing,” she said. “That’s the only way you’ll get the water out of the wrong pipe.”

When the fit ended, he had tears running down his cheeks and his face was a furious red. Handing him a tissue, she felt a rush of tenderness for him, something almost maternal. Here’s a guy, she thought, who needs to be looked after. “Do you have a girlfriend?” she asked, his weakness giving her courage.

He blinked, surprised. “Yes, I guess I do.”

She smiled. “You guess?”

“Yes, I do. Sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”

“What’s her name?”

“Danielle.”

“I hope she appreciates you,” she said, earnest.

He nodded slowly. “She says she wants to move in with me.”

Elise regarded him, intrigued. “Do you want her to?”

“I think so, but I’m not sure.”

“Do you have a picture of her?” she asked, suppressing a sudden urge to wink, something she never did, except at small, shy children.

He hesitated before taking his phone from his back pocket, and after a few seconds of pressing and repressing two or three buttons he found a picture and handed her the phone. The display showed a startlingly pretty redhead in a black tank top, Billy in a Dodgers hat looking handsome and proud and suntanned next to her, his arm around his girlfriend’s pale, gleaming shoulders. “That was taken a few months ago,” he said, blushing. “We were in San Francisco for her birthday.”

“She’s so gorgeous,” said Elise, feeling a tremor of jealousy in spite of herself. Didn’t she have her hands full enough with Renn? Yet it was terribly fun to flirt with Billy, and she savored this perilous impulse, as if on a dare she were thrusting her finger through a flame. “She looks very sweet too. I can see why you’re with her.”

“She is sweet. Most of the time, anyway.” He paused, putting the phone back in his pocket. “What’s it like working with Marek Gilson?”

She reached for his water bottle and took a drink. “He’s very good,” she said. “His heart really seems to be in it, but I think everyone in the cast is crazy about this film.” She liked Marek well enough but wasn’t nuts about his recreational name-dropping, which seemed a little absurd to her because he had already made it, and in her opinion he had little to prove, though there was also the chance that he was trying to remind her of her place, making it clear that he knew more people than she did, that he was the film’s real star whereas she was still at the stage where she needed to prove her worth. Before she had started acting, she had always assumed that male and female actors did not feel competitive with each other, that there was only same-sex rivalry, if there had to be any rivalry at all. Now she realized how naive this assumption had been.

“My dad loves this film. His screenplay is really good.”

“You should tell him that,” she said.

Billy looked at her. “Why do you say that?”

“I don’t know. I just think he’d be happy to hear it. I would be.”

“I think I already told him that I liked it.”

There was something unstudied about him that she liked, something softer and less demanding than the swagger or smugness of the grown children of the other seasoned movie people she knew. She wondered if it was his mother’s influence, or else Renn had tried not to spoil his son and daughter too much. Elise was a little afraid to meet his daughter, whose med-school pedigree intimidated her.

“It’s so hot today,” she said, lifting her hair off her sweaty neck. He nodded, then looked away.

“I’d better go,” he said.

“Really? Already?”

“Yes, I’d better,” he said. He didn’t say good-bye but gave her a small wave before he opened the door to her trailer and disappeared. He hadn’t taken his bottle of water, which she noticed was still in her hand.

That night, after a bubble bath and a room-service dinner in Renn’s room, she discovered that the rumor mill was as robust on the
Bourbon
set as anywhere else. “I told Billy not to bother you,” he said. “Especially when you’re resting.”

“He wasn’t bothering me. I invited him up. I wanted him to tell me all your secrets.”

“I don’t think he knows them.”

She laughed. “Really? He must know a few.”

“Not if I can help it,” said Renn.

She couldn’t tell if he was being ironic. Her amateur powers of psychoanalysis seemed to be eroding under his influence. She said nothing.

“Why did you invite him into your trailer?”

Well, she thought, suppressing a smile. He’s jealous.

“I wanted him to help me go over some lines for my next scene.” She wasn’t sure why she persisted with this lie.

“You shouldn’t have left your assistant back in California, Elise. She might have come in handy here.” He smiled as he said this, but she could tell that he was annoyed.

“I feel more comfortable being on my own than having Gwynn with me all the time. I don’t really like being someone’s boss.”

“All right, but you can always ask one of the production assistants here to help you. Or I’ll do it if I’m not busy.”

She laughed. “You’re always busy.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

She hoped that she hadn’t gotten Billy into trouble. The PR task, at least, had been straightened out to Renn’s satisfaction, and
Bourbon
was likely to receive as much prerelease buzz as he hoped for, maybe more. The first movie he had directed,
The Zoologist,
had done very well critically, and although the box office receipts were modest, it had still earned a little more than expected. She had watched it before she auditioned for
Bourbon at Dusk;
some of it had been over her head, and there wasn’t a lot of dialogue, but she had been able to tell Renn that she had loved how he had progressively softened the light on the female lead, one of only five characters in the film with a speaking role. By the end, she was almost out of focus, something that had reminded Elise of how Laura had been portrayed in a film version of
The Glass Menagerie
that she had seen in high school. Renn had been impressed, telling her that Tennessee Williams was his favorite playwright. She didn’t know if she had a favorite playwright, but she told Renn that he was hers too.

“Billy was a perfect gentleman,” she said.

“I’m pretty sure that I can trust him,” said Renn, giving her a foxy smile. “But the jury’s still out on you.”

3.

There was a moment a week later when Elise thought that Billy might kiss her. They were alone in the elevator at the Omni, riding up to their rooms, and she was telling him a silly story about how her childhood pets had all been named after flowers, even the males. At the end of the story, the elevator doors about to open, he gave her a look that she recognized as the kind that sometimes accompanied a romantic confession: “I’d really like to make love to you right now,” or “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.” It wasn’t that these words had ever been spoken to her in this situation, not exactly, but she had heard them in movies and had always hoped that she would someday find herself in an elevator or on a rainy boardwalk with a handsome man who would reveal that he wanted to kiss her and then he would do it. It would feel right too, and they would somehow make it to the nearest bed without much difficulty, and maybe, a year or two later, she would marry him. (They would also be millionaires but not really have to work, and aside from two perfect children, she would rarely desire anything else.)

After she and Billy had stepped off the elevator and were standing uncertainly in front of the closing doors, he didn’t kiss her, but he touched her arm and said something that she knew she would remember for a long time. It was a confession, a startling one that she would keep to herself until she started seeing a therapist several months later who suggested that she ask herself if maybe it was the son she really wanted, not the father. The therapist would also say that Elise was probably not ready to commit to anyone for the long term and might not be ready to do so for several years.

“If it weren’t for my dad,” Billy said quietly, “I’d be doing everything I could to convince you to go out with me.”

She didn’t know what to say, but when she opened her mouth to speak, he held up his hand. “Please forget I said that,” he said, blushing. “I never say things like that.”

“I’m very flattered,” she said softly.

“You are?”

“Of course I am, Billy.”

We faltered, his smile apologetic. “Would you mind calling me Will?”

“Oh,” she said, embarrassed. “Sure. I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s fine. I just prefer Will.” He pulled a folded piece of yellow paper from the back pocket of his shorts and handed it to her. “This is for you. I hope you won’t show it to anyone.”

She stared at him. “What is it?”

“It’s something I wrote last night. I’m not a writer, so it’s not very good.”

She could feel her stomach leap. “Hey,” she said. “You should never apologize for a gift. That’s something my grandfather taught me. He’d even refuse a gift if someone apologized for it. My grandmother hated it when he did this, but people stopped apologizing, or else maybe they just bought him better presents.” Her cell phone started to ring then, the ringtone the one she had assigned to Renn, but she didn’t reach into her purse to answer it.

“You’d better get that. I’ll see you later,” said Billy.

“Billy. Will, I mean. Wait.”

He looked at her.

She held up the note. “Thank you.”

He nodded, then turned and left her with the paper gripped in her damp fingers. Her room was in the opposite direction, around the corner and at the far end of the hall, only three doors down from Renn, something she wondered if he had requested when their hotel rooms had been reserved. She couldn’t wait to read Will’s note, but when she was slipping her key card into her door, Renn opened his door and she hastily stashed the note in her purse, annoyed but not showing it. He was wearing his robe and a smile, the robe meaning that he wanted to have sex before dinner. After dinner, if there was no night shoot scheduled, his habit was to watch the dailies. If they waited until after the dailies to have sex, he was sometimes too tired, or else he didn’t last long and she would have to finish for herself. But when he was awake and had the energy, he was the best lover she had ever had.

4.

Six days later, Will went back to L.A. He left without saying goodbye, and although she had a pretty good idea why he left the set early, she was surprised that he hadn’t tried to speak to her one more time before going home. She didn’t have his phone number, and she wasn’t sure where he lived, only that his place was close to the Getty. The night he gave her the note, she hadn’t been able to read it until almost midnight; Renn had asked her to watch the dailies with him, and she said yes because he didn’t always ask. Taking her clothes off and slipping into bed with him before dinner, she was reminded that he was the most exciting man she had met in a long time, much more exciting than the French teacher she had had a crush on during her junior year at UT-Austin, a young professor whom all the female students and a few of the male students had been smitten with because he was from Paris and not yet thirty, but most of all because he resembled Olivier Martinez, the sexiest film star anywhere, aside from Renn maybe, that Elise could think of. As if she had scripted it, M. Tanguy became her lover a few weeks after the semester ended. She had run into him at the grocery store, where he was buying mangoes and Camembert. He had chuckled over the cliché: “I love French cheese,” he said, grinning adorably. “It is true that you cannot take the France out of the Frenchman.” That he had not spoken in French made her wonder if he was nervous seeing her too. Without directly meeting her eyes, he had asked her to share the cheese with him, and they dated until early August, when he went home to Paris for three weeks. After his return, he told Elise that he had gotten back together with an old girlfriend and that he could not keeping seeing her. Now, from time to time, she wondered if he had seen any of her movies, if he regretted breaking up with her so unceremoniously. It had taken her all of the fall term to get over him, even after she had been flown to Hollywood and had auditioned for a role in a Vince Vaughn comedy that subsequently she was chosen for, and from then on, her life was very different.