Little Known Facts: A Novel (19 page)

3. He hadn’t had a prenup with Lucy, but he did have one with me. He must have known that he would eventually want to dump me too. It wasn’t that the agreement was stingy, but I should have known that if he could foresee the possibility of divorce, he could probably also foresee himself going through with it.

4. He cheated on me. He slept with at least two of his costars, the first when they were off filming in Bordeaux, the second in Lima. These were the two affairs that he admitted to. I’m sure there were more, but I didn’t have proof. The reason I found out about these two tramps was because the one from the Bordeaux shoot called and told me. She was trying to steal Renn for herself, I’m sure, not do me any favors, which is what she had the nerve to claim: “You should know that he’s not a good guy. If he’ll run around on you, you really don’t need that. What self-respecting woman does?” I told her to go to hell. I told her that it wasn’t any of her goddamn business what happened in our marriage because I was the one wearing the ring on my finger, not her.

The tramp from the Lima shoot didn’t call, but she did send a letter to Renn that I intercepted. She was such an idiot; she should have sent it to the studio, not his home address, but I guess she thought that I’d be too lazy to collect our mail each day, let alone open it. I can only imagine the stories Renn told her about me, the two of them bonding over my alleged bouts of depression and how my gray moods must have taken a toll on poor Renn who deserved a strong woman, even if he wasn’t ever home to spend time with her or to talk to her for more than five minutes every few days when he was out of town.

5. He tried to keep his kids from me after he filed for divorce. It was sad for Billy, Anna, and me because we liked each other, for real, and the fact that Renn didn’t want me seeing them anymore, let alone talking to them on the phone, was probably more hurtful than when I had to deal with the two tramps gloating over how he’d fucked them.

6. He often laughed at me when I mispronounced a word or if I didn’t know things like Kathmandu is the capital of Nepal or that Bora Bora is an island in French Polynesia, not a city in Malaysia. But how many people do know these facts? I graduated cum laude from USC with a degree in communications. I’m not stupid, but there are so many things to know about the world, and God forbid I didn’t know all of the exact same things that Renn knew. Does he know how to make beurre blanc? Does he know that cheesecloth is an important tool when you’re making fruit preserves or Greek yogurt? I’m sure he doesn’t. He was so condescending so many times that it’s a wonder I didn’t dump him before he had a chance to dump me.

7. He left me for another woman. Poetic justice, some will say, considering how he and I got together. Sure, I understand. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t suffer. He didn’t marry her though, probably because she moved to Prague to pursue a career as a sculptor, which seemed pretentious and ridiculous to me at the time, and still does, frankly. She had the money to do it though and not get anxious if her work was awful and didn’t sell, because her father owned a rifle factory in Virginia. Renn met her when he was making a film about the Civil War in the same town where her father’s factory is. After he divorced me, it was only a few months before she moved to Europe and told him that she was going to dump him if he didn’t buy a place in Prague and spend at least a few months of the year there with her. I have to say that I kind of admire her guts, or maybe it was just an air of entitlement. She was only twenty-four at the time and almost model-beautiful and probably had lots of men after her, though I doubt any of them were both famous and rich the way Renn was.

Other questions people (therapists, mainly) have asked:

What one thing did Renn do that made you happier than anything else?

That’s a hard question too. I guess you could say it’s that he noticed me, when there were so many other women (and men) who wanted him to notice them too. He also made it possible for me to quit my job, which I liked well enough while I was doing it, but if you don’t have to work, it’s pretty tempting not to. I started to drink more than I should have though, having so much free time on my hands and no kids to take care of, other than my stepchildren once in a while. But they didn’t need me to take care of them, both of them independent and bright enough to keep themselves busy. I once blamed Renn for my excesses with alcohol, and this got around in an embarrassingly public way, but I don’t drink anymore and haven’t in about a year and a half.

What did you learn about yourself while you were married to him?

One thing I learned is that I don’t do well with uncertainty. This is something my current therapist helped me to figure out. I realize now that most people don’t do very well with uncertainty because the biggest events in our lives, namely, our births and deaths, are out of our control, so in between these two points, we try as hard as we can, almost to the point of insanity (and beyond, in some cases), to control what we can. I’m not a fatalist, but I do think that there are quite a few things that we can’t control, like what time the mail will be delivered or how many dings we’ll get on the car in the parking lot, or why we like raspberries more than strawberries. Actually, many things probably are beyond our control, even the people we’ll fall in love with, but I suppose that if a movie star comes calling, you’re more likely to fall in love with him than the guy bagging your groceries. I suppose what I mean is, I could have been smarter, I could have recognized the odds against long-term happiness when I fell for a movie star. The bagger is probably a safer bet, even if he doesn’t earn much of a living, because for one, he doesn’t have anywhere near the same number of sexual options that a movie star does.

There was never a day or night when I felt truly at ease being Renn Ivins’s wife. I think I must have known from day one that it wouldn’t last, in part because he left someone else for me, which I did feel bad about (I’m not the sort of competitive freak show who thrives on stealing other women’s guys), even though I didn’t ever offer to return him to her. If I were a different kind of woman, all along I might have been able to say to myself, “Just have fun and enjoy the ride while it lasts,” but I’m not that kind of woman. I wish I were, but I’m not.

What have you learned about yourself since the divorce?

I knew myself pretty well by the time Renn and I divorced, but I wasn’t particularly thrilled with what I learned during our marriage, namely that I was often very jealous, insecure, needy, angry, vindictive, afraid. I knew that people everywhere were plagued by these same feelings, but it didn’t matter because I was the one feeling them. That’s like saying, “Don’t be afraid of death because we all die.” No kidding, but that doesn’t really make it any better, does it?

What did Renn spend his money on?

1. He spent it on cars. When we were married, he had a Porsche Spyder like the one James Dean died in, a Jaguar, a silver Mercedes convertible, a Lexus, and a Chevy half-ton pickup for when he felt like pretending he knew how to do home-improvement projects like repairing the cedar deck that led from the sliding glass door off the kitchen to the pool. I think he still has most of those cars, or newer models, along with a Smart car (a gift from the manufacturer—I doubt he ever drives it, but his housekeeper apparently does) and a hybrid Ford Escape. He keeps half of these cars in a separate garage that he rents one town over from his house in the Hollywood Hills.

2. He spent it on his kids. He put something like six or seven million dollars X 2 into trusts for his son and daughter, which they couldn’t access until they turned twenty-one, and I think the most they can take out during any one year is two or three hundred thousand, unless Renn gives them permission to take out more. That’s still a lot of money, and with these trusts earning interest and dividends on the bonds and stocks or whatever Renn set up with his broker, Anna and Billy are set for life.

3. He spent it on his first wife. She gets a lot of money from him every year because she has never remarried. Something like two or three million, probably, on top of the twenty million in property and liquid assets that she got at the time of their divorce. She doesn’t need it either, being a doctor who probably earns at least half a million on her own annually.

4. He spent it on food. He goes to the French Laundry up in Napa Valley as often as he can, which is about three or four times a year. He goes to Chez Panisse almost as often, which, like the visit to the French Laundry, requires a flight up to San Francisco and a limo driver or else he rents a car and drives himself and whichever woman is accompanying him. He also has an excellent chef named Spike Light (really) who, since our divorce, cooks his meals whenever he’s in L.A. and not dining out. He took this chef with him from time to time when he was doing shoots in Mexico or other places not too far away, but eventually he had to stop because the chef is married and his wife got angry when he left town for more than a few days, not trusting him to keep it zipped up or who knows what.

5. He spent it on staying (or at least looking) young—personal trainers, nutritionists, collagen injections, facials, Botox, dietary supplements, very expensive hair and skin products, hair and eyebrow stylists, massage therapists, private yoga and Feldenkrais classes, acupuncturists, aromatherapists, fashion consultants, karate and capoeira instructors, mud spas, mineral baths, protein powders, spirulina, manicures, and yes, pedicures.

6. He spent it on real estate. He owns vacation homes in Palm Springs and on Sanibel Island in Florida. He also owns a huge house in L.A. (where I lived with him after Lucy moved out with their two kids), a three-bedroom condo in New York City (with a twenty-eight-hundred-dollar monthly assessment, which he pays whether he’s there or not), and a two-bedroom apartment in Rome.

7. He spent it on clothes. He likes Armani, as cliched as it is for a movie star to like this designer. He also likes Ralph Lauren for casual clothes, and someone named Manfred G, who is a designer in New York who “creates” silk neckties and socks, charging something like five hundred dollars for his boring, monochromatic ties and two hundred for a pair of silk-and-wool socks.

8. He didn’t spend it on drugs, nor did he spend it on strippers, as far as I know. He did give some of his money to charity every year, and he was generous with friends and family. I think he has probably “loaned” his brother Phil at least a million dollars by now. Renn put his nephew Tyler through college, and gave him money for a car, clothes, books, and spring-break trips, all of the same things he gave to Billy and Anna.

9. He spent it on reserving a seat on a Space Shuttle trip to the moon. (Just kidding.)

10. He spent it on an astrologer. (Not kidding—at least once a month, either in person or over the phone, depending on where he was working. It cost five hundred an hour or something exorbitant like this. Renn might not be a drunk or a druggie like my first ex-husband, but he certainly has his expensive addictions.)

Some things Renn said:

1. On 9/11, which is about the same time our marriage collapsed: “How could this not have happened to us? We barge around the world with our guns loaded and our dicks in our hands and expect people to offer us their virginal daughters and oil reserves, but not everyone wants to do what we tell them to.”

He also said, after the bombs started to fall on Afghanistan: “If I were a younger man, I’d go to Kabul and teach drama classes for a year.”

I told him that they needed volunteers to rebuild their hospitals and sewer lines and restore their power grid more than they needed someone to teach Shakespeare or David Mamet or whoever he would have taught. He was offended by this and told me that I was a philistine, a word I had to look up later. But I still thought my comment made sense—before opening their copies of
Romeo and Juliet,
the Afghanis would need functioning toilets and lights to read by, wouldn’t they?

I also didn’t see why he had to be a young man to teach in Afghanistan. He could go at forty-three as easily as someone who was twenty-three. It’s not like I wanted him to go, but by that time, I was so tired of his lame excuses for not doing the things he bragged he might do that I wouldn’t let him coast by with this whopper.

2. “I understand why people want to be vegetarians, but who do they think they’re fooling? We’re carnivores, and most of us have the pointy canines to prove it.”

He said this during a discussion he was having with his daughter about her decision to become a vegetarian during her freshman year of high school. She didn’t stick for very long with her no-meat diet, and when she returned to her old ways, Renn gave her a twenty-pound box of Omaha steaks, which she wouldn’t accept, furious with what she perceived as his gloating. “I told you that I’m only eating chicken and fish, not red meat. Ever,” she fumed. I’m sure she meant it, but I’m also pretty sure she did go back to eating red meat again. By that time Renn and I were divorced, so I don’t know what he did when he found out that she was eating steak again. In case it’s not clear, he likes to tease people, but he’s not a big fan of being teased himself.

3. “I’m an ass man
and
a tits man. Why should I have to choose between the two?” Indeed. The usual laws of supply and demand do not apply to movie stars.

4. “The reason I’m hired for the best roles is because I am the best. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with saying this, because it’s true.”

He said these modest words after
Parachute Point
debuted (his crappiest movie, worse than
The Writing on the Wall,
if you ask me.
Parachute
is totally cheesy, and the boy who played his son was smarmy with a capital S) when being interviewed by a movie critic for the
L.A. Times.
I’m not sure why Renn thought he could get away with saying something as self-aggrandizing as this and not be made fun of or lose some of his fans and industry allies, not to mention his friends. His publicist had to perform God knows how many unholy acts to convince the journalist not to publish this quote.