Little Known Facts: A Novel (22 page)

After we got back from France, Elise’s sister Belle started calling a few times a day and wanted to talk to her for an hour or more each time, and Elise absolutely did not have the space in her schedule for this, especially with our prerelease obligations for
Bourbon—
the several TV and radio interviews (only a couple of which we did together, though by now our relationship was common knowledge), the magazine photo shoots, the extra features for the DVD version that I had insisted on starting early, which included interviews with principal cast members and voice-over commentary from Elise, Marek, and myself. She was also reading scripts for the project that would follow the next two she had already committed to.

If it wasn’t clear to Elise, I could certainly tell that Belle was dealing with some serious emotional problems following her attempted suicide, which I did feel bad about, but there wasn’t a lot that Elise could do to make her better, not being a doctor (something she didn’t appreciate me reminding her of). Despite how depressed Belle was, I did not like that she was calling all the time and draining Elise’s energy, which made it nearly impossible for her to enjoy her talent and good fortune, and the heartening trajectory of her career, which was suddenly soaring. These were crucial months in Elise’s professional life, and if she couldn’t give the majority of her attention to her work and the people involved most closely with it, her preoccupation was likely to have serious repercussions on her future prospects.

“She’s my sister,” Elise said during one of our arguments, tired and angry. “What am I supposed to do? Hang up on her after five minutes?”

“You could stop answering your phone every time she calls,” I said.

“I don’t answer it every time.”

“No, but you answer it most of the time. She’s taking advantage of you. She knows you feel guilty about everything you’ve already been able to achieve while she sits at home in Dallas with your parents and mopes.”

“You don’t know my sister. She’s not like that.”

You’re either dreaming or lying, I wanted to say, but I didn’t.

I have my own problems, probably not as unpleasant as hers, but there are things that keep me up at night, even after they’ve been written down in J2 or J1. One of them is
Bourbon
’s release date. If I waited until October or November, I’d have a better shot at positioning it as an Oscar contender. Fall is Oscar season, when the bullshit that populates the theaters over the summer has mostly faded away and people are ready, with the end of their vacations and the return to school, to see some intelligent films. But a fall release also means that there’s more competition for serious moviegoers’ time and money.

On top of this, there is my inability to trust anyone with the oversight of my finances. Having been burned twice, predictably, I’m nervous about entrusting my investments and the general accounting activities related to my day-to-day life to a so-called professional, but unless I want to do it all myself, I have to trust the people who work for me. Fidelity and Wells Fargo seem trustworthy, and unlike the two crooked business managers I’ve worked with, the first a second cousin (he was also a supposedly reputable CPA when I hired him), they are large corporations that aren’t likely to bilk their clients in an underhanded way. Like any Fortune 500 company, they bilk their clients in broad daylight.

Yet another worry is my son. For one, I’m pretty sure that he still has a crush on Elise, and even though I’m not about to hand her over to him if she even wanted to go to him, which I’m pretty sure she doesn’t, I can admit that a match between them, at least where their ages are concerned, makes more sense. Born only two years apart, they grew up listening to the same music, using the same slang, watching the same television shows, wearing the same brands. Billy would also be able to give her more attention than I can because he isn’t dealing with publicists, agents, producers, fans, ex-wives, charity spokespeople, investment advisers, personal assistants—the list goes on and on—close to twenty-four hours a day. Basically, he could devote his life to her if this were something that she required. But the truth is, I can show Elise things that Billy cannot. I know a lot more about the world than he does, and if I were Elise and were choosing between him and myself, I’m pretty sure that I’d choose the same way she has.

She
did
choose me. I don’t even have to pretend that any of this is a hypothetical situation. When Billy tried to seduce her in New Orleans last fall, when he wrote her such an earnest love poem that the paper practically dripped blood and tears, she apparently told him, “Thank you, you’re sweet, but I’m quite happy with your father.” I’m sure Elise was very tactful. I was not. When I finally boiled over, a day or two after I saw the poem in Elise’s hotel room, I was not as calm as I should have been. I might be an actor who has won a number of major awards, but in this case, I was not able to perform the way that I should have. No punches were thrown, and I didn’t call him any names either, but what I did say was, “If you ever pull a stunt like that again, you won’t be able to draw one more cent from your trust account. For the first time in your life, you’ll actually have to work for a living.”

Does this qualify as blackmail? I don’t think so. But it was a threat, and a serious one that I intended to follow up on if forced to do so. If he were to run off with Elise, why should I support him? The thing is, I realize that I can’t know what he or Elise are up to twenty-four hours a day, nor do I want to, but I’d like to believe that she does love me, and that Billy has gotten his head on straight and has stopped trying to woo her away. It makes it more difficult to see him, because when I see him, obviously I’m not with Elise, and when I’m with her, I can’t be with him too. He and I have never had an easy relationship, at least not since his mother and I divorced. He wasn’t openly hostile after I left Lucy, but he moped around a lot and lacked the enthusiasm for life that a twelve-year-old usually has—boys his age generally want to go out and do things, they want to see their friends and play sports and go to pool parties and the mall and school mixers and amusement parks. Billy did do those things sometimes, but he wasn’t a kid known for being the life of the party. His sister was quiet too, but she was so often smiling and sweet and thoughtful, making me cards with drawings of our cats and dog, or hiding cute little notes in places where I’d find them later:

Dear Dad,

Why did the window go to the doctor? Because it had panes!
Love, Anna

And:

Dear Dad,

Did you know that coffee is the most recognizable smell in the world? Is that why you drink so much of it? Hee hee!
Anna

If Billy and I got along better, I’d have him work with me any time that he wanted to. We could even consider starting our own production company, but of course that’s now a pipe dream. One thing that I could really use him for is help starting a foundation that will give financial assistance and legal and medical aid to the victims of Hurricane Katrina. It doesn’t matter how many years have passed—New Orleans still hasn’t bounced back, and it’s not going to for a while, if it ever really does. If
Bourbon
makes any money, once we cover our production costs, five percent of the profits will be routed to my foundation, which I’ve tentatively named Life After the Storm. If you make even a third of the kind of money I do and don’t donate to worthy causes to any significant degree, you’re a bastard.

Hollywood liberal, yes, I know, but why shouldn’t I be? I have to wonder what it is the self-serving CEOs who run our country and the rest of the world are so afraid of. With their enormous assets scattered in banks and investments across the globe and their armies of hired bodyguards and vacation homes on four continents, why do they act as if they’re more vulnerable and besieged by the world’s miseries than the poorest forty percent here or abroad? I give fifteen percent of my annual earnings to the charities I believe in. Capitalism has been good to me—I won’t dispute that—but it hasn’t been good to everyone, and the number it continues to be good to shrinks every day. If this sounds like socialism or communism, so be it.

Fifteen percent of my annual earnings is a lot of money by most people’s standards—almost five million dollars last year, which was a particularly good year. But then, most of them have been since I graduated from college thirty years ago.

Something else that has been on my mind—my ex-wife Melinda Byers’s memoir, which is mostly about our marriage, and it has a title that I can’t help but find offensive:
This Isn’t Gold.
She must have been very bored and embittered up there in ugly, impoverished Santa Barbara or Big Sur, whichever house it was where she wrote that book. The terms of our divorce were generous—she will be very comfortable until she dies unless she really screws things up—but she still seems intent on trying to convince the world that she is a woman scorned, misunderstood, and generally wronged by the Fates and of course by her asshole movie-star ex-husband.

I know that I must sound bitter too. No matter that I have everything society tells us that we can and
should
have. One thing I kept thinking about after I met those two French-Israelis in Cannes was how they reminded me of something an American director I’ve worked with said to me about American alpha males. His words won’t go away, because I’m pretty sure he’s right: “One of the reasons we dominate the film world and most everywhere else is because we’re bigger than most other men. I mean physically, not intellectually. We’re overfed, overgrown, and overconfident, and we’re so intent on winning any contest we can be a part of that if we’re not smart enough to win fairly, we’re strong enough to beat our rivals into submission.” I had the sense, standing next to the Palme d’Or-winning director and producer, that they hated me more for being a foot taller than they were than for having made a fine film, one that doesn’t feature any of the usual Hollywood crap—no guns, no drug abuse, no projectile vomiting, no car chases, no bar fights or catfights, no gratuitous cursing, no gold diggers, no midlife crises, no nine-year-olds giving their parents romantic advice. When we wrote the screenplay, Scott and I were very careful to avoid the usual stupid tropes.

Anyway, Melinda and her memoir. Isis has told me that the book has actually raised my stature in both the material and the spiritual worlds: I have acquired, at last, a fully formed soul. Because the rest of the world, if they care to look, can now see my flaws and insecurities more clearly. I have been summarily humbled, and great goodwill is coming my way as a result of this unsanctioned unveiling. I could be more skeptical about it, sure, but I choose not to be. If something like this—someone else’s words rather than a doctor’s prescription—brings you comfort, you shouldn’t sneer at it.

Elise, who doesn’t know anything about Isis, except that I talk to a psychic from time to time, thinks I should just be able to put Melinda’s memoir out of my mind, as does Anna. I know they’re right because there have been a lot of things printed about me that I’d prefer not to have out there. But nothing this personal, especially not from someone whom I was very close to at one time. When I met Melinda, she was beautiful, sweet, in need of rescue from low self-esteem and a bad marriage, and also endearingly starstruck, but not in the annoying way that fans sometimes are. She didn’t feel compelled to tell me every other minute how much she loved my work, how much better I was than every other actor, how her parents and friends would never believe she had met me—could she take my picture? Great! How about a few dozen more?

People are buying this memoir, and they aren’t buying it because they love how Melinda writes. I’m trying to feel flattered, but it’s not easy. She’s definitely not a writer, and she won’t ever write another book, unless she gets on the children’s book bandwagon, which it seems everyone, including the guy who trims the neighbors’ hedges, is probably about to cash in on.

My brother says I should sue for slander, but I don’t see the point. The book is already out there, living its own sorry life, having its sordid affairs, and unless every copy can be hunted down and destroyed and every reader’s memory of it wholly erased, the damage is done. Why bring more attention to it? I also have no desire to stand in a courtroom with Melinda a second time and look on the weary, knowing face of a judge who is likely to think we are both spoiled children.

We are a cheating species, both male and female, whether or not we are famous. Why, I would really like to know, does this fact continue to surprise and scandalize so many people?

Some people say, Isis included, that I should thank Melinda. After all, I’m getting older, and although I keep doing respectable work and might have the kind of longevity Clint Eastwood has had, I do know that the laws of gravity apply to me, despite what that
Vanity Fair
columnist wrote. I realize that I won’t always be interesting to moviegoers or journalists. I also realize that there is a date of expiration to all of these good times, one that I can’t predict; probably no one can, not even Isis. And this is something I have to live with because it can’t be burned away on the first day of every new year.