Little Known Facts: A Novel (16 page)

Will’s note was half poem, half love letter; it made her smile until her cheeks hurt, her eyes tearing up, in part because she had a feeling that she would have gone down the hall to thank him, and maybe also to kiss him, if she hadn’t already been involved with his father, who was asleep on the other side of the locked bathroom door.

Dear Elise,

I’m not sure if I’ll give you this. It seems

too much of a risk, for so many reasons.

I think of you

as a woman

who must receive notes like this one

almost every day.

Still,

I cannot keep

these thoughts to myself anymore.

When I close my eyes

I see you

as spun from gold and silk

and a dove’s soft wings.

I can only guess what it is like

to touch you—

you would be softer than warm rain

falling

from a midnight sky.

Yours would be the one

breath to bring me back to life

if I were trapped

in a room with no windows,

the light fading outside,

the walls too close. It is impossible

for me to stop thinking about you.

—New Orleans, October 26

At first, she did not want to recover from the feeling the poem gave her. It was as if she were lying on her back, floating in the Pacific, nothing at all on her calendar for the next few weeks. This never happened anymore, both the blissful beach-going and the open schedule.

When she climbed into Renn’s bed after reading the poem several times, she could feel Will’s presence down the hall. She imagined him lying in his bed too, wondering if she had liked his note, if she might also have a crush on him. She didn’t know if she did, but his poem affected her more than any other gift had in a while, even the elegant platinum bracelet Renn had given her two days earlier. He had had it sent overnight from Tiffany’s, a detail he had only shared with her after she had pried it out of him. As far as she could tell, it was not his habit to brag about how much money he spent. The fact that he had ordered her such a beautiful and tasteful gift while under the many pressures of
Bourbon
’s production had impressed her. Or had he made Will order it? She really hoped not, especially now. Yet whoever had ordered it, the bracelet seemed proof that Renn was wooing her, that their involvement was probably more than a fling to him.

At one thirty in the morning, sleep still not close enough, she wished that Will had never come to New Orleans. She had been perfectly happy before his arrival, when all she had wanted was to concentrate on her new relationship with Renn and on acting as capably as she could in her role as Lily, the film’s heroine. What could Will possibly be expecting her to say to him? “You’re irresistible”? “I’m dumping your dad, and as soon as this movie wraps, let’s elope”? Maybe he only wanted her because he couldn’t have her, and certainly not without a big scene where someone was likely to get hurt badly.

Finally, at 2:00 a.m., she got up and took one of Renn’s sleeping pills, and all the next day she felt alternately sluggish and anxious, wondering when she would see Will, and why he affected her as he did. He was very sweet and good-looking, but his poem and its schoolboy earnestness affected her more than his looks. And the fact that he had bluntly told her he desired her, knowing as he did that she was seeing his father—it was this impulse, its rebelliousness, and above all, its murky, masculine competitiveness—that attracted her most.

Will didn’t appear where she was until five that afternoon. He couldn’t meet her eyes because he was with his father, and when he turned and left the set, she glanced timidly at his retreating back, his shoulders slumping as if in resignation or defeat. There seemed no way that anything could happen between them. But she didn’t think she wanted anything to happen, either. Most plainly, she wasn’t free, and he was also seeing someone else—a woman whom Elise could even imagine herself liking if they were to meet. Will had no business cheating, nor did she. And his father, as calculating as it might be to think such a thing, would undoubtedly be able to do more for her, was, in fact, already doing so much for her.

5.

Even in early adolescence she had not believed that she could settle for the kind of life that it seemed most adults she knew had settled for. While her friends were already discussing how many children they would have, what kind of houses and cars they wanted, and where they would work and live and take their vacations, she was thinking that she might do something else, that maybe she could be famous and not have to live in a brick ranch house with three small bedrooms and plumbing problems because tree roots had grown into the pipes. She did not want to marry her high-school sweetheart, who was likely to become fat and lazy by the time he reached thirty. She had read too many
Cosmopolitan
articles and Dear Abby columns about infidelity and marital discord before her seventeenth birthday that it was probable that marriage’s supposed enchantments had been spoiled for her for life.

As for her nebulous desire to be famous, her mother had enrolled her and her sister in tap dance and ballet classes starting when they were four, and although Elise had done well in both, she had not been the best student in the class. Her sister Belle had been a little better than Elise was, but what interested Belle most about the classes were the costumes—the special shoes and leotards and especially the tutus they got to wear for the ballet recitals. Belle was her mother’s daughter: infatuated with pink and ruffles, and learning to sew, and matching her hair ribbons to her shoes and girl-sized purses. Elise was her father’s daughter: athletic, impatient with clothes that needed to be ironed and hung in the closet, bookish and boyish-looking until she reached puberty and suddenly she had breasts, as well as shapely arms and legs that extended far beyond hemlines. By fifteen, she was two inches shy of six feet and growing into the face she would have when a film director visiting Austin for the South by Southwest Music Festival in the spring of Elise’s junior year at UT spotted her in a club and gave her his card and asked her to call him because she might be the girl he was looking for to play the daughter of a character Diane Keaton had all but committed to playing in this director’s next picture. Elise had the look—she was that memorable.

A week later, she did call him and he remembered her, but instead of flying her to Hollywood, he asked her to send headshots, ones she had a friend take because she couldn’t afford to hire a professional photographer, and when she sent them off to the director, he didn’t acknowledge their receipt for two months, and by that time, she was dating the French professor, but the director didn’t forget her, and it was he who called in early October and asked if she might be interested in auditioning for a comic role in a film about two brothers who were driving the corpse of their eccentric uncle cross-country in order to complete a secret burial ritual, one his will had specified. She thought it sounded like a very stupid movie but she agreed to audition, and then it turned out to be a Vince Vaughn picture and she knew that she would take the role if they thought she was good enough. She had been in the drama club in high school and had acted in three plays in college, but had only had small roles because the acting students always won the leads. It was clear to her that the director wanted her mostly because he liked the way she looked, but there were plenty of others who had started out this way too.

The dead-uncle movie ended up being a big hit, and she was offered roles that were much better, but paid much less. Even so, her agent said, “Take a couple of them and raise your stock, because the people who make the better studio movies will see that you can actually act.”

When her parents saw that she was succeeding, they were relieved but worried that she had been forced to do things that compromised her self-respect, which she hadn’t, not really, though the director she’d met in Austin had made it clear while they were filming
Uncle Fenstad’s Last Request
that he would be game for an affair if she were interested. She was not at all attracted to him, and he was newly married. By flirting outrageously but pretending a religious aversion to adultery, she was able to sidestep his offer without crushing his ego. This performance, she realized a year or so later, had been much better than the one memorialized on celluloid for
Uncle Fenstad.

Her sister’s reaction to her success was more complicated than their parents’; Belle was jealous and felt excluded but was also intensely curious and, like their mother, full of grim warnings. “They’re eventually going to want you to show your tits,” she said. “They’ll make you, I bet.”

“Not if I have it written in my contract that I won’t show them.”

“You can do that?” said Belle, disbelieving.

“Yes. A lot of women do.”

“But you’re just starting out, so you’re probably going to have to do things you don’t want to.”

“Maybe, but I’m not going to worry about that until I have to.”

“Well, I’d worry about it now. You should be prepared.”

Since graduating from the University of North Texas two years before Elise left for Hollywood, Belle had been living in Dallas with their parents and was employed as a social worker at a county medical clinic where she counseled immigrants and other disenfranchised poor. Elise admired her but suspected that her sister had already had a bit of a martyr complex before taking the clinic job, which was underpaid, exhausting, and full of miserable cases that Elise tried not to imagine, at least not with any frequency. She and Belle had been very close as girls, but when Elise was growing into her long-limbed body, Belle grew awkward in hers, and she gained more weight from late-night pizzas and candy bars at college than anyone had expected. That most of the boys who called the house, starting when Elise was in ninth grade and Belle in twelfth, were asking for the younger, not the older sister had been one of the first wedges to come between them.

Another wedge: after
Uncle Fenstad,
Elise donated fifteen thousand dollars to Belle’s clinic, hoping this would help restore her to Belle’s good graces, but her largesse had the opposite effect—Belle resented that she didn’t earn anywhere near enough money to be able to make the donation herself. Their mother also seemed unnaturally accepting of Belle’s self-pitying tendencies and general unhappiness—“Belle has such a good heart. I just don’t understand why there isn’t some decent young man out there who will see how wonderful she is and adore her as much as she deserves to be adored.” It was disorienting and upsetting to feel her mother’s and sister’s growing hostility in regard to her own good fortune. When Elise made the mistake of saying to her mother during an argument that she and Belle were resentful of her for doing so well on her own, her mother grew very chilly: “I can’t believe you would say such an ungracious thing about your sister and me. Shame on you, Elise. We have always wished for nothing but happiness for you.”

As the phone calls home grew more stilted after Elise moved from Austin to California, she made them less often. Her father was the one constant; he sounded the same as always—cheerful but missing her, supportive but cautious. He also visited her more frequently than either her mother or sister did, Belle saying that she had trouble getting time off from work, which Elise knew was mostly true. Her mother worked too; she was part owner of a flower and garden shop, and the other owner was often at home, attending to a disabled son. Her mother also said that she did not like L.A.; she found its endless highway systems ugly and frightening, and the people unfriendly and self-obsessed.

“But they’re like that everywhere, Mom,” Elise said. “Dallas isn’t exactly the altruism capital of the world either.”

“I know that,” Mrs. Connor said tartly, “but people are worse where you are.”

About these strained family ties, Renn had given Elise what she thought was good advice: “Just wait it out. This is all as new for them as it is for you.” Later he added, “It can be rough when the people you’re close to become successful, especially if things stay the same for you.”

6.

It wasn’t a Freudian slip, at least she didn’t think it was, but she had acted careless in a way that she usually never did: she left Will’s poem on the desk in her room, only half covered by a folder of hotel stationery. She kept going back to read it and didn’t always take an extra few seconds to put it away. Most of the time she went to Renn’s room anyway, because it was bigger than hers. But four nights after Will had given her the poem, Renn stopped by unexpectedly while she was still getting dressed for dinner. Before she had any idea what he was doing, Renn had read the poem and set it back on the desk.

“My son wrote that, didn’t he,” he said. “I had no idea he was a poet.”

She was in the bathroom, applying mascara. Hearing his words, she froze.

He stood in the doorway now, looking at her, his expression carefully nonchalant. “I don’t want you to bother lying about it, Elise. I recognize the handwriting. If you’re interested in him, you can tell me. If he’s the one you prefer, okay, but I don’t want you seeing both of us.”

He was smiling, but she could see that he was upset. I’m going to screw this up, she thought, feeling guilty, even though she knew that she had done nothing wrong. It didn’t seem like she had, in any case.

“He’s not the one I prefer,” she said, putting the mascara wand back in its tube. She went to Renn and hugged him. “Not at all. You’re the one I want.”

Renn let her embrace him for a second but then pulled back to look into her face. “What does he think he’s doing, writing poems for you? He knows we’re together.”

She hesitated. “Have you told him that we are?”

“He knows.”