Little Known Facts: A Novel (18 page)

“You know it’s been five months?”

“Yes, of course I do.” She paused. “I have to hang up now, Will.”

He was silent.

“Will,” she said, plaintive and impatient. “I have to hang up. Please say good-bye.”

He still didn’t speak, and after a few more seconds, she hung up on him, sick as it made her feel. It was only five days since she had gotten back from Dallas, and although her sister was home again and had taken a leave of absence from work, Elise continued to feel off-kilter and anxious, and
You Knew Me When
was no longer as much of a joy as it had been before. She had had trouble sleeping since Belle’s hospitalization, and Will’s e-mail hadn’t helped. And now this phone call where he had put her on the spot, and to her alarm, she had felt a strange elation when he’d said, “I think you might want to be with me instead.” But why did she? He had no job and no clear idea of what he wanted to do professionally, and he also seemed to resent his father’s success, just as her sister and mother resented hers. Her life had been going along fine without him. She was in a relationship with a man she desired and respected; she was acting in good films and making a lot of money.
Bourbon
was going to premier at Cannes, and she would get to go there with Renn and it would be her first visit to the south of France and everything would be perfect if she could learn to focus on what was good for her rather than trying to sabotage her life by letting in the chaos she seemed lately to be so attracted to.

Will’s number was in her phone now, and his e-mail was on her computer. He was offering her something that she knew she shouldn’t want because it could not compete with what she already had. But he was competing anyway, and she had to admire his bravado, taking on a man like his father who did not, as far as she could tell, ever lose.

A MEMOIR BY MELINDA BYERS

He told me when we met that he had been fat as a child, and it wasn’t until he turned sixteen that he lost the extra thirty pounds he’d been carrying around since age eleven. I wasn’t sure if I should believe him because at the time I was working as a caterer, and I thought he might be making up this story in order to persuade me to bring him low-fat snacks that weren’t on the menu the studio had decided on. It turned out that he wasn’t lying, because eventually I saw the pictures that proved he really had been a fat kid. He looked so different in these photos from his current healthy and handsome self that his transformation seemed almost miraculous. “What finally made you lose the weight?” I asked.

“My brother’s girlfriend,” he said.

“Was she an aerobics instructor or something?”

His smile was sly. “No, I had a crush on her and wanted to steal her from him.”

I think I laughed, but I can’t remember for sure. I do know that I was a little taken aback. “Did you?”

“No, but I certainly tried.”

He loved to eat, still does, I’m sure, and I know how to cook, so it was, for a little while, a match made in the kitchen, if not in heaven. That day in July when he appeared at the table where I was setting out fruit cups and brownies, he was the sexiest man I had ever met. He was thirty-eight and I was twenty-nine, recently separated from a husband who was very earnest about ruining his life by shooting up whenever he could get the drugs his body had become dependent on, which was every day by the time I left him. If you had told me when Toby and I separated that my next husband would be a movie star, I would have laughed in your face. Even though I catered movie sets all the time, the only guys who talked to me were the crew and a few of the actors with bit parts, probably because they assumed I’d be an easy lay, which wasn’t true because (a) I was married, and (b) I’m not a slut. But I was, I guess you could say, kind of a babe. I had big breasts (real) and long legs and thick black hair that has since gone gray and now I have to dye it. I still have the boobs and the legs though. Renn was a fan of all three. He was also, for a while, the ideal man, a wild dream that seemed to have come true. Not surprisingly, I assumed that he’d be the love of my life.

It should be clear from the start how much I cared for him because some of the things I have to say on these pages won’t flatter him. Nonetheless, I feel like I have to write this book because a lot of people think that marrying a movie star is the next best thing to being a movie star. Well, guess what, it’s not. It’s very hard. Basically impossible, as it turns out, and I’m pretty sure that Renn’s first wife would agree with me, considering how things worked out for her too. I have never suffered so much as I did during the four and a half years of my marriage to Renn. I never once felt that I had him for real. I assumed that he would go back to his wife and kids, or that one of his beautiful, famous costars would steal him from me. It happens all the time. If it didn’t, part of the economy would collapse because a whole slew of gossip rags and bloggers would be out of business. The fact that it doesn’t happen even more often is a mystery to me. If you spend three months, six or seven days a week, behaving with someone the same way that you behave with your lawfully wedded husband or wife because the script calls for it, you are bound to get attached. The line between what’s real and what’s not is easy to blur, and on a movie set, it sometimes feels like how my college dorm felt on Friday nights—there’s the sense that just about anything goes, and with everyone’s parents so far away and oblivious to what their children are up to, sometimes crazy things do happen.

Where is Andrea, Renn’s brother’s coveted girlfriend, now? She’s married, with three grown daughters, and lives in Youngstown, Ohio, where she’s been an elementary school teacher for the past twenty-four years. (I know this because Renn’s brother [Phil] told me. He got in touch with her recently through Facebook. Renn’s brother’s Facebook friends: 217. Renn’s Facebook followers: 1,089,476. Not as many as younger actors, but still a pretty good number for an actor in his fifties. He [or, more likely, his publicist] maintains a fan page instead of a regular account because I suppose it would be too hard to keep up with so many individual “friends,” and he would also probably have to deal with a lot of messages and posts from fans gone rabid. I used to have these nightmares where strange women would come up to me and throw acid in my face when I was out with Renn because they were so jealous. It never happened, but more than a few times we almost had to run away [literally] from someone who wouldn’t leave us alone.)

I once asked Renn if Andrea ever contacted him after he became famous, and he said that she had. I asked if anything had happened between them. It took him a few seconds to reply, but he said no, no, he was already married to Lucy by then.

Where is Renn’s brother now? In Niles, Illinois, which is a Chicago suburb not far from where they grew up. Phil is also a teacher, though he teaches high school students, not grade-schoolers. He works at Niles North, which is close to a fancy shopping mall where a month before we were married, Renn bought me three thousand dollars’ worth of clothes at the Marshall Field’s department store—four dresses, three pairs of shoes, two summer sweaters, one pair of tailored linen slacks. We were visiting Phil and his family because Phil’s son was graduating from high school and he wanted Uncle Renn to come and make him look good in front of all of his unconvincingly jaded classmates. Renn was nice about obliging because he liked playing the role of the coolest uncle in the world, as Phil’s son called him in front of all of his teachers and the entire graduating class during his salutatorian speech. Tyler didn’t mention his father in the speech, but Phil was smiling when I glanced at him. I suppose he had gotten used to the fact he couldn’t compete with his brother, at least not anymore.

The irony is, after Tyler’s speech, Renn said to me under his breath, “I wish my own son felt even half as lucky to have me as a father.”

Self-pity? Yes, I suppose so. Even if you make twenty-five million dollars or more a year, you’re not necessarily going to be happy. What I’ll say about Renn’s son, Billy, is that he wasn’t a bad kid. He was twelve when Renn and I got together, and his sister, Anna, was a year younger. (I thought she was a sweet girl when I knew her, and she probably still is, but she didn’t return my phone calls while I was working on this book.) Anyway, if you’re twelve and your parents are getting divorced, you’re going to be mad at them and at the world. Billy was no exception, but he didn’t take out his anger on the family cat and dog (Squirt and Tuba) or hit his sister or steal cigarettes from the convenience store near his middle school. I always thought that he would become an actor too, but in high school he only tried out for a couple of plays and was cast in small roles that he apparently thought weren’t worth his time. In college he majored in economics, but I don’t think he’s put this degree to use. He’s good at math though, something his father isn’t, which is one reason why he’s been robbed by two different business managers in the course of five years (though both of them were caught—one by Lucy, the other by Renn’s investment broker—and forced to return the money).

I was born in Cary, North Carolina, and for the first ten years of my life, I wanted to be a nurse because one of my mother’s sisters, Aunt Judy, was a nurse. She is one of my favorite people and can play the harmonica and the piano and tried to teach me both, but I couldn’t sit still for long enough to get beyond the practice scales. After that, I wanted to be a teacher, and then a radio broadcaster, either as a deejay or as a producer. After college, though, I couldn’t get a job in radio to save my life or anyone else’s, despite the increasingly short skirts I wore to interviews when I knew the interviewer would be a man. The jobs almost always went to a male candidate, a couple of whom were fired within a month, and then they’d bring me back to interview again and not offer me the job a second time. Eventually, out of fury and desperation, I took a job at an overpriced, mediocre restaurant in Century City as a prep cook before I decided to learn how to cook for real, which required more loans, for culinary school this time, and several angry promises to my father that I would pay him back, which I did, but not all I owed him until I married Renn.

Movies have always been a part of my life, as they are a part of most people’s lives, and because I lived in Los Angeles from the age of eighteen on, they became even more important to me because I would often see movie stars doing the same things that average people did—sitting in traffic jams, eating breakfast at a diner, even, in one case, checking out library books (it was Debra Winger who I saw doing this, or else she had an identical twin). When I started catering for movie studios, I was even more intimately connected to them, but I felt as if there were an invisible wall between me and the actors and more famous directors, one through which I would never be allowed to pass. It’s not like I cried myself to sleep every night thinking about how small my life was compared to the people who were getting top billing (or even middle) in the credits in each production that I catered, but I did feel this sense of isolation and hopelessness at times—my husband’s drug use certainly didn’t help matters—and when Renn noticed me and started coming by the catering van a couple of times a day to talk to me about the places I had traveled (not very many) and the books I had read, I probably would have forfeited ten years of my life to be his mistress, not to mention his wife. Girls from small towns in North Carolina (or anywhere else, for that matter) do not usually end up the wives of famous men. We are taught, tacitly or no, to stay out of trouble, to think kind thoughts and behave with tact and forbearance, to get a good education, and to be sure that we can provide for ourselves if necessary. We are not supposed to talk back or expect too much from life or put on airs. If we do those things, we will surely be putting ourselves in harm’s way. You reap what you sow—this is probably the mantra of all small southern towns, if not northern ones too. I have reaped what I have sown, and this, I suppose, is my cautionary tale.

Over the years, a few people have asked me what one thing Renn did while we were together that upset me more than anything else. If you’re going to ask a question like that, you probably aren’t too worried about causing pain because you’re forcing someone to revisit a moment in her life that likely she has tried to forget. Yet if you catch her at the right time, she might actually enjoy this chance to say something unkind about the person who treated her badly.

What was the one thing?
Well, there wasn’t just one. Marriages fall apart because eventually there is a critical mass of wrongdoing and petty selfishness that suffocates all of the affection and desire that presumably once existed between the couple. Renn almost never bothered to call me or have someone call on his behalf when he was delayed in meetings or on the set. I can’t remember how many times I cooked us what I hoped would be a dazzling meal but then was forced to eat alone or throw it in the garbage because by the time he came through the door, grouchy and not at all interested in talking to me after his long day at work, the food was cold and congealed and generally unappetizing. And this was when he was in town. For half the time we were married, at
least
half, he was far away, often on the other side of the planet. I was invited to go with him to a few of his faraway shoots and stay for a week or two, but usually that was when his kids were also invited and he needed me there to look after them.

Some other things he did that won’t win him any trophies:

1. He sometimes went to parties hosted by his movie friends and didn’t invite me along.

2. He wouldn’t even discuss having a child with me. “Out of the question,” he said. “Who’s going to raise the kid? I’m gone a lot and you certainly can’t do it by yourself. You can barely get yourself dressed in the morning.” (An exaggeration. I had bad days once in a while, but they didn’t happen that often.)