Little Known Facts: A Novel (2 page)

Will knows that he could do the same thing—disappear overseas for months at a time—but the idea has never appealed to him. He likes California, his apartment, his sister and mother’s proximity. He spent a semester in Scotland during college and drank too much and slept with girls who liked him because his father was Renn Ivins. Luca once asked him, “Wouldn’t it be worse if you had a famous brother? Your dad at least is twice your age. It’s not like you can go on a double date with him.”

“Why couldn’t I?” Will had said.

“I guess you could, but why would you? He’s your dad, you freak.”

He dials his father’s number now and is surprised when he answers. Renn sounds tired and deflated for a few seconds before his voice rises to its usual breezy conversational pitch. “I just talked to Anna,” he says. “She said you took her out for her birthday. That was nice of you.”

The compliment makes him feel shy. “It wasn’t a big deal. She went out with Jill and Celestine for lunch, so it was just us at the steak place she likes in Pasadena. Mom’s in New York. Anna might have told you.” He is the dutiful son, filling in the blanks for his absent father. He can’t help it. He has always wanted to be good, to be applauded too for this goodness. But Anna’s comment that their father thinks he only calls when he wants something rankles. Still, he can’t find the nerve to confront him, not so soon.

“How’s Danielle?” his father asks.

“She’s in Hawaii with a couple of friends.”

“Why aren’t you with her?”

“She didn’t invite me.”

His father hesitates. “I want to ask you something.”

Will feels his stomach sink. “Okay.”

“We’ve had a couple of people quit down here, and my assistant is taking a leave of absence. Her mother just found out she has cancer, and she asked Trina to come home for a while. I wondered if you’d be interested in flying down here to fill in for her until we’re done shooting. You’d be making phone calls and running errands for me. We’ve got about a month left. Unless you’re busy.”

It has been several years, since his second year of college, that he has worked on a set doing odd jobs for his father. The last time was for a film that had an enormous cast of extras, which Will had been hired to assist with, and was shot partially in Kenya, partially in Kashmir. He developed digestive problems in India and had to be sent home early. His father had asked him two years later to help with a shoot in Romania and Russia, but Will had declined. This is the first time since then that Renn has offered him work. “I don’t know, Dad. Can we talk about it when you’re here? Aren’t you coming home on Friday?”

“No, not anymore. There’s too much going on right now.”

“Can I at least think it over for a day or two?”

“No, I need to know tonight. If you can’t do it, I have to make other arrangements.”

“Can you give me an hour?”

He sighs. “All right. One hour. That’s all I can afford.”

Before they hang up, Will says, “I thought I was the one who called only when I wanted something.”

His father laughs softly. “You called me, Billy.”

“I don’t call you only when I need something.”

“Did I say that you did?”

“That’s what Anna told me.”

“I don’t remember saying that. I’m sorry if I did. I must not have meant it.”

After they hang up, Will sees that his sister has sent him a text message:
Dad not coming. No dinner Sat. Ur off the hook.

In the morning he catches a flight from LAX to New Orleans. His ticket is waiting at the airport, the machinery of his father’s life well lubricated by his fame and large bank account.

His sister says she’s happy that he’ll be helping their father again, but asks in the same breath about his plans to retake the LSAT.

“I can still do it when I get back,” he says.

“Don’t you have to study?”

“I will.”

She laughs. “In New Orleans?”

“Why not? If I don’t apply this fall, I can always do it next year.”

It takes her a long time to reply. “Yes, you could,” she finally says. “If you still feel like it.”

New Orleans is much warmer than he expects when he steps out of the terminal and into the town car his father has sent for him. The outlying areas of the city have a stunned look, the effects of the hurricane still visible, despite the years that have already passed. He feels both guilty and relieved to have been living so ignorantly elsewhere, unaware of the scope of the city’s troubles. His father’s interest in it, his research and his four visits in the years since the storm, had until now only seemed to be a businessman’s pragmatism: here was a beleaguered region that could enhance his reputation and earn him more money if he managed to fashion something cinematic out of the ruins.

He is taken directly to the Omni Hotel on St. Louis and Chartres by a silent driver, an older, completely bald man in a dark gray suit. His father and a few of the film’s actors are also staying at the hotel, his unit production manager having negotiated a good rate on a block of rooms, but no one is in the reception area to greet him. The Quarter looks as he remembers it, largely unscathed by the storm, its black wrought-iron balconies glistening in the sun, their hanging ferns and flowering potted plants as effusive as he remembers them from a trip during his junior-year spring break, several months before the hurricane. His father’s film is being shot in the Quarter as well as in Metairie and on a shrimp boat in the Gulf. Will read the script early in the morning before he got on the plane; his father had given him a copy months earlier, but he had only glanced at it then. It is genuinely good, a story about a brother and sister trying to recover their livelihood after the storm and to keep their mother’s health from failing.

It is two in the afternoon, and he is struggling to stay awake. He didn’t sleep well the previous night and couldn’t sleep on the plane either, but after hanging up the few pairs of pants and the nicer shirts he has packed, he lies down and drops off immediately.

Fifteen minutes later, he is awakened by the hotel phone’s strident ring. His father’s voice is on the other end of the line. “You didn’t pick up your cell, Billy,” he says, not bothering with hello.

“I must not have heard it,” he says, his voice cracking.

“You sound like you were sleeping.”

“I was.”

His father hesitates. “I’d really like you to be down in the lobby in five minutes. George will be there, and he’ll take you over to the set. We’re almost done setting up the street scene outside the Ursulines, and we’ll start shooting in the next half hour. I’d like you to be here before we do.”

“Who’s George?”

“The same person who picked you up at the airport. Didn’t you introduce yourselves?”

“We shook hands, but he didn’t tell me his name.”

“You might have asked him.”

Will is silent.

“Five minutes,” his father says again. “Can you be ready?”

“Yes.”

George is sitting on a sofa reading the newspaper when Will appears in the lobby ten minutes later. The driver stands up and folds his newspaper when he sees Will. His father’s reprimand still stings, and he doesn’t ask the older man his name when they face each other for a moment before George directs him outside to the car. He sits in the front instead of the back seat this time, guessing that the driver finds this preference strange, but neither of them says a word. There are dozens of tourists in the streets, some moving slowly in the heat with their heavy bodies and melting frozen drinks in plastic souvenir glasses shaped like a naked woman’s torso, but the drive takes only a few minutes, the convent only eight or nine short blocks from the hotel. He could easily have walked but knows that his father told his driver to take him so that he wouldn’t dawdle in his room.

Before he gets out of the car, George looks at him and says, “I think your dad’s grateful that you could be here right now.”

Will stares at him. He would sooner have expected the driver to reveal a humiliating affliction than to comment on his effect on his father’s well-being. “He is?”

“Yes.”

He falters. “Okay, well, thanks for telling me.”

George nods. “You’re welcome.”

He wonders if the driver is his father’s confidant. His father’s friends, for the most part, are other actors, but Will wonders how close most of these friendships really are, if jealousy keeps them from confiding in each other.

There is a small crowd of spectators near the set, several of them members of a sunburned family dressed in New Orleans Saints T-shirts and ill-fitting shorts. They stand squinting on the sunbaked sidewalk near the white utility trucks that have been transporting the movie equipment from one end of the city to the other for the past four weeks. The catering van is surrounded by a half dozen crew members, each sweaty and tired-looking and holding a bottle of water or Diet Pepsi. His father isn’t in plain sight, but Will’s phone rings as he walks toward the crew.

“I’m here, Dad,” he says. “By the catering van.”

“Can you come around to the west side of the convent? I’m over here with Marek and Elise, getting ready to start shooting.”

“Okay, I’ll be—” But his father has already hung up.

Marek and Elise are
Bourbon at Dusk
’s stars, the brother and sister trying not to self-destruct. Will has met Marek once or twice, but not Elise, who is just beginning her career and is two years younger than he is. She is from Dallas and has a southern accent that she only reveals in interviews. He doesn’t think that she has been allowed to use it for this film either; if so, Marek would also have to speak with an accent. Elise is beautiful, tall and slender with strawberry blond hair and hands that gesture animatedly when she talks. Will watches entertainment news shows and other junk TV that his sister doesn’t have time for and his mother says that she has no interest in, though he knows she follows his father’s career closely. She sees his movies in their first week of release, but rarely has anything good to say about them. After fourteen years, it bothers him that she is still bitter about the divorce, but Anna sees it differently. “I think she feels like she failed him. She would never admit it, but I do think it’s true.”

He didn’t call his mother before he left for New Orleans, not wanting to bother her in New York with news that was likely to annoy her. He could imagine her pretending not to mind Renn’s offer and Will’s acceptance of it, but she would mind. She has never remarried but has had male companions. None have lasted for more than a year. It must be hard on them, Anna once mused, to feel like they could never measure up to Dad.

His father is standing on the sidewalk in shirtsleeves and khaki shorts, sweating in the afternoon heat as he talks to Marek and Elise. His chest hair is visible in the V of his green cotton shirt, and he wears sunglasses, Ray-Bans that look like the ones Will gave him for his birthday the previous April. The cameraman is several feet away, making adjustments to his complicated and expensive device. Two sound guys with the boom mic that they’ll hold above the actors’ heads, just out of range of the camera, stand a yard or two away. There is also an electrician inspecting one of several cords snaking out of a power strip, a makeup artist powdering Marek’s face and neck, and a couple of older men, one heavyset, the other tall and almost gaunt. Will guesses they are the film’s producers. He sees Elise staring up at his father, her tanned, perfect face rapt, and his breath catches. It looks like she is in love with him, a man who is probably older than her own father. Perhaps she is already his girlfriend.

His father glances away from Elise and spots him. He smiles and motions for Will to come closer, hugging him briefly and hard before introducing him to Marek, then Elise. The actor has professionally mussed hair and three days’ worth of whiskers. Elise’s hair is in uneven braids, and there are dirt smudges on her chin and right cheek. Her hand is damp in his when he shakes it. She smiles and says, “You look just like your father.”

He doesn’t think that he does, but feels his heart leap at her words. Maybe to her they do look alike. Or else she is a canny liar. “Thanks,” he says. “It’s very nice to meet you. I’m a fan.”

Her smile widens. “You’re so nice to say that.”

“We’re getting ready to do the scene with the argument about the money Tim lost in the card game,” his father says. “Tim is Marek’s character.”

“I remember,” says Will, feeling his face flush. “I reread the script this morning.”

“Let me talk to them for a couple of minutes, and then I’ll tell you what I need you to do.”

Will smiles at the ground, incensed that he was ordered to rush over to the set in spite of his exhaustion. He goes back around the corner to get a drink from the catering truck, feeling his father’s eyes on him, but he doesn’t turn to say he’s not going far. He thinks that he has made a poor choice, that he would have been better off staying in L.A. and waiting for Danielle to come back and do what they usually do together—eat in restaurants and shop and see movies and the occasional play. He knows that he should be studying for the LSAT and researching law schools, making plans for his future that are more solid than any others he has made in the past. But he isn’t sure if he wants to be a lawyer. He doesn’t know what he wants to do tomorrow, or the next day either. It is a problem that has plagued him since childhood—there have always seemed to be so many choices, a fact that strikes him as more oppressive than having no choices at all.

He takes a bottle of Gatorade from the ice chest at the foot of the folding table, where a scattering of apples and plums lie on a bed of rapidly melting ice. A few of the crew members smile at him, but no one tries to talk to him. He doesn’t want to talk to anyone either. He can feel the approach of a headache, and the heat is a heavy sheet that sticks to him like a suffocating second skin.

His phone rings. His father again. He walks back around the corner without answering. Marek and Elise have taken up positions on the sidewalk a few yards from where they were standing earlier. The makeup artist, a ponytailed woman wearing a jean skirt and red Converse hi-tops, is now dabbing at the smudges on Elise’s face. Will’s father hands him a piece of paper with several names scrawled on it. Underneath each one is the name of a periodical. “Can you call Fran and ask her to call these people and try to schedule phone interviews for me for Saturday from seven to ten p.m.? I can give them each fifteen or twenty minutes. She knows that I’ve talked to them all about past projects. They’ll do some advance press for
Bourbon.”