Little Known Facts: A Novel (17 page)

“If you didn’t tell him, maybe he didn’t.”

“But you told him after he gave you the poem?”

“Yes.” She paused. “Wait. Maybe he said that he knew you and I were dating, but he still wanted to give me the poem.”

Renn’s face colored.

“Did he.”

Fuck, she thought. I’m so fucking stupid.

“He might not have. I can’t remember,” she said.

“Try.”

She could feel herself start to sweat. “I really don’t remember, Renn. I know he said that he wasn’t much of a writer but he was going to give me the poem anyway. That must have been what he said.”

“He’s not in a very good place right now, Elise. He’s never had a real job, and he’s almost twenty-seven. I think he’s suffering from depression, but I doubt he’d acknowledge it if anyone asked him. The kid has been spoiled his whole life, and I can admit that some of this is his mother’s and my fault, but some of it is his. His sister is about to finish medical school at the top of her class, and the two of them couldn’t be more different if one of them had been raised by wolves, the other by nuns.”

“I’m not interested in him,” she said. “Really, I’m not.”

“You’re your own woman, and I won’t tell you what you should or shouldn’t do, but if you’re going to be with me, there can’t be any others.”

“There aren’t,” she said. “That’s the truth.”

He studied her for a long moment before pulling her to his chest.

“Good, because I won’t share you.

I’m not capable of it.” “I’m not either,” she said.

“You’re the only woman I’m seeing, Elise. If you weren’t, I wouldn’t have any right to tell you not to see someone else.”

She hoped he would never find out that she had gone to Will’s room two nights earlier to thank him for the poem and had allowed herself to be invited in, the door closed behind her. They had talked for a minute, Will blushing, she nervous and a little giddy, and then she had let him kiss her. She had let him put his arms around her and she had put hers around him, her body pressed against his, and she had felt his hardness while they kissed, and then she had pulled away, guilty with her desire for him, and ashamed of herself for giving in to her curiosity and lust when she was the girlfriend of Renn Ivins, a handsome and very talented actor-director-screenwriter whom she knew she should consider herself lucky to work with, let alone share a bed with.

Will had said nothing after she pulled away, even though she meekly apologized before leaving him in his bachelor’s room with its bedside lamp illuminating the rumpled bed, the sheets and comforter twisted violently, as if by a fever victim.

7.

One thing she had been warned about but had found herself unprepared for was how it seemed that almost everyone she knew now felt entitled to gifts of money from her. Loans she would have been more amenable to, but the few people who pretended they were asking for loans made it seem as if it were a joke—she had enough money, didn’t she? Why couldn’t she just give it to them? Ha ha. Only kidding.

They also wanted auditions or some sort of industry job or introductions to other famous people, whether she knew them or not. They wanted invitations to A-list parties (or B- and C-list—any Hollywood party would do), and life-size cardboard cutouts of characters in films that had been released years earlier. They wanted to borrow the clothes she had worn for a role, which were the studio’s, not hers. They wanted to stay at her house for a couple of weeks while they looked for a place of their own, or else they just wanted to live with her, period, and be a part of her entourage, because surely she had one. Didn’t all famous people have entourages? Even worse was that people she had barely said three words to in high school or college were somehow finding her private e-mail address or phone number or else they were leaving messages at the studio asking her to help them break in to the business. She was also being asked to donate to every imaginable charity, to put in guest appearances at fund-raisers and hospital galas and company picnics and grocery store and car-dealership grand openings and the
quinceñera
for her landscaper’s daughter. When she complained about these requests to her agent, he told her to let her personal assistant or her publicist talk to the demand-makers; she should never talk to them herself. When she complained to Renn, he laughed and said, “You’ll need to get used to these kinds of requests as fast as you can. The more successful you are, the worse it gets.”

In airports, at the post office and the gas station and Starbucks, she was asked for her autograph. She was told how beautiful she was—
even more so in person than on the silver screen!
(a claim she didn’t really believe)—how talented, how destined she was for everything a person could hope for: Oscars, Golden Globes, the perfect husband, the perfect children, the perfect house and house pets and gardener and poolmen and Grammys.
(Oh wait, Ms. Connor, those are for singers, aren’t they?)

Because now, quite suddenly, she had something that tyrants and revolutionaries had waged wars over for thousands of years: power—both financial and sexual. It was not an illusion either; she could ask for any material object or personal service that she desired, pay for it, and have it delivered, overnight or later that same day. Any straight man she wanted, she could probably also have. Her power alarmed her, and on one morning when the sun shone furiously behind her heavy silk shantung curtains (new and expensively hand-sewn) at the house she had bought in Laurel Canyon less than a year earlier, she had been seriously resistant to getting out of bed. This was after
Bourbon at Dusk
had wrapped, while Renn spent four nearly sleepless weeks editing the film, fortifying himself with caffeine and something stronger from his doctor, she suspected—during which she was alone with him precisely five times, one of them on New Year’s Eve, and only for three hours. He couldn’t afford any real breaks until he was done editing the dozens of scenes they had shot into a presentable enough format to submit to the Cannes Festival’s screening committee by their mid-February deadline.

She had gone home to Dallas for Christmas because she knew that Renn planned to see Will and Anna and then go right back to editing. Elise wasn’t sure if she would be invited and assumed not, considering Will’s love poem, which Renn had not brought up again, but it was still there between them like a small electric force field. Nonetheless, he had wanted her to stay in L.A. so that they could be together when he wasn’t working. She had planned to visit her parents for four days but left on the morning of the third day because she and her mother had argued so often, and her sister had recently been dumped by a guy she had gone to high school with, who, a few minutes before breaking up with her, had asked for Elise’s e-mail address, something that it seemed Mrs. Connor blamed Elise for more than Belle’s ex.

Coming home from Texas, she had felt depressed and sad and resentful of the unfair treatment her mother and sister had inflicted on her. Renn told her that it would pass, and although he sounded sympathetic and told her to come straight from the airport to his place, she said that she would see him in the morning if he could spare an hour or two because she knew that he worked best at night and she didn’t want to distract him. In fact, she wanted to go home and mope. She did not feel like talking to anyone, especially after having to be nice to the few dozen strangers who had stopped her at both airports to ask for her autograph. She could only hold a smile for so long before it started to feel like her face would freeze into a permanent grimace.

At home, she put her suitcase in the guest bedroom closest to the master bedroom. She had left two other larger suitcases in there already, neither of them unpacked. Her days were so busy, or else she felt too tired to put away the clothes she had taken to New Orleans, despite being home for more than a month now. Her next project,
You Knew Me When,
would start in late February, and most of it would be filmed in southern California, with one two-week shoot in Argentina scheduled for early April, but she didn’t know when she would bother to unpack the New Orleans suitcases, and now she had the Dallas one too. It seemed easier to buy new suitcases, which could be purchased online in about three minutes, and she also grew tired of her clothes so quickly these days that she preferred to shop for new ones rather than unpack the old ones and keep wearing them. She had told no one that she was doing this; she knew it was shameful, the opposite of her parents’ admirable thriftiness. Her thought was that eventually she would donate her old clothes to charity or give some of them to Belle if she lost enough weight and wanted to take them.

She could have had her housekeeper unpack the suitcases for her; Marita had offered several times, but Elise wasn’t yet used to the idea of someone else organizing and maintaining her wardrobe. Gwynn, her personal assistant, who was ten years older, very efficient, and not particularly talkative, which was fine with Elise, could have been asked to unpack the suitcases too, but she had not told Gwynn about them, fearing her disapproval, or worse, the confused, vaguely scornful look that would pass across her face while Elise tried to explain herself.

8.

A week before Elise left for Argentina, two things happened: Belle tried to kill herself—halfheartedly, as it turned out, but it nonetheless deeply frightened Elise and her parents. The second thing was that Will wrote to her; it was the first time she had heard from him since he’d left New Orleans.

Elise was only given a day and a half off from
You Knew Me When
to fly home to Dallas to visit her sister in the hospital, and although she tried to get another day off, the producers said, No way in hell. Her sister looked pale and puffy and embarrassed when Elise arrived in her hospital room, their parents sitting nearby, faces drawn and very weary.

Elise didn’t know what to say, other than “Why would you do this to yourself? To our parents? What the fuck were you thinking?” She kept her mouth closed.

Belle cried when Elise leaned down to the bed to hug her, and Elise started crying too. “I’m sorry,” Belle said weakly into her sister’s hair.

Elise could feel Belle’s tears on her neck and wondered for a witless second if she was responsible for Belle’s misery. If she hadn’t gone to that club and met the director . . . if she hadn’t called him back . . . if
Uncle Fenstad
hadn’t done so well . . . but these were ridiculous thoughts. Even so, they persisted. If only Belle were a brother, then the sibling rivalry would be of a different shade, if it existed at all. From what she had been told, Renn’s brother Phil handled Renn’s success capably. Sisters, however, especially ones close in age, rarely seemed to be devoted allies, something Elise had figured out in high school.

Her mother was too stricken with grief and worry to start an argument about anything, and when she flew back to L.A. the next day, Elise felt a little more secure in her relationships with her mother and sister than she had in a while. Belle had told her that she hadn’t actually wanted to kill herself, but she had been so angry at her ex-boyfriend, having seen him out with another girl the night before, that she supposed she had wanted to show him what a bastard he was.

Elise wondered if Belle had lost her virginity to the bastard, but she didn’t ask. Belle claimed to have lost it her freshman year in college, but Elise had never been sure, especially because her sister had gotten so chubby, and as far as Elise knew, Belle had not had a boyfriend in Denton during her four college years.

Before she went to the airport, Elise offered her sister a gift. “If you’d like to go to a spa and relax for a couple of weeks, I’ll send you to one I like in Scottsdale. There’s a great one in Cabo San Lucas too, if you don’t mind going to Mexico.”

“I’m not sure,” her sister said wanly. “I’ll let you know.”

“I think it’d be really good for you.”

“I look so bad in a swimsuit,” said Belle.

“Don’t be silly. It’s a spa. You can wear a robe the whole time you’re there if you want to. You can sit on the veranda and read romance novels and not do a thing except get a massage and eat fresh fruit all day.”

“I’ll have to think about it,” was all Belle would say.

Before Will called her, he sent an e-mail asking if she minded if he called, and if she didn’t, could he have her number? He had gotten her e-mail address from his sister, who had most likely gotten it from their father, but Will didn’t know for sure. He included his own phone number in the e-mail, saying that if she wanted to, she could always call him. But she didn’t call, nor did she know what to say in response to his e-mail, so she stalled. Before she had a chance to think of a tactful reply, he called her. Hearing his voice, her stomach and heart both leaped. It was as if he were in the same room, about to kiss her again.

“Can I see you?” he said, no hello, no awkward pleasantries.

“How did you get my number?”

“I’ve had it since New Orleans.” He hesitated. “My dad gave it to me when I first got there. He gave me all of the main cast members’ cell numbers.”

“. . . Will, I don’t think it’d be a good idea for us to see each other.”

“Does that mean you don’t want to see me, or you don’t think you should?”

“I don’t think I should.”

“Why not?”

“You know why. Because I’m with your father.”

“But maybe you could be with me instead if you wanted to.”

She sighed. “No.”

“Could you translate that?”

“No,” she repeated.

He was silent. Then he said, his voice breaking, “I can’t stop thinking about you, Elise. I don’t know what to do about it because I’ve tried to date other people since Danielle and I broke up, but I haven’t been interested in anyone else.”

She felt her throat constrict. She wanted to see him, but would not let herself tell him. It would be a mistake, for so many reasons. “I’m sorry, but I can’t be with you. I just can’t.”

“Break up with him. I think you might want to be with me instead.”

“I haven’t heard from you in over five months, and now you’re calling to tell me to break up with your father?”