Little Known Facts: A Novel (26 page)

He had come to Paris to try on a new identity, to live a different life from the one he had in California. He thought that it might become permanent, but he did not have to decide anything now. The language, at least, was not a daunting mystery because he remembered some of his high school French, and he had started watching three or four French films a week when he decided after spending a day and a half in the hospital, recovering from a case of dehydration and heat exhaustion, that he needed to move away from Los Angeles and his parents, though he had never before wanted to do such a risky thing.

Seeing the worried faces of his mother and sister and the guilty face of his father while he was held captive in the small, sterile hospital bed at Huntington Memorial, he knew that his life would not change and he would never be happy if he stayed where he was. His father’s strange, remorseful behavior, the multiple apologies for nothing specific, had unnerved him, and when his father embraced him before leaving and accidentally dislodged the IV in his hand, Will thought that he had seen tears in his eyes, something he didn’t remember ever happening before. The tears had upset him more than the vague apologies, and when he talked them over later with his sister, she had said that their father was getting older and maybe was realizing how important his family was to him. Or maybe he felt sentimental because everything was going so well for him, even more so than usual—
Bourbon at Dusk’s
reviews and receipts had exceeded his expectations, and he was probably exhausted from interviewing people to staff the Hurricane Katrina foundation he was about to get off the ground. “And of course there’s Elise,” said Anna.

“What do you mean?” asked Will, wary. He hadn’t seen his father’s girlfriend in five long months, and hearing her name, he felt a stab of anxiety and longing. Jealousy too.

“I’m sure keeping up with her wears him out.” She paused. “She and Dad came over for dinner a couple of weeks ago. I invited a friend and grilled some salmon for the four of us. It was nice but a little awkward. Elise insisted on helping me with the dishes afterward because she said she couldn’t let me do everything. She kept complimenting me too—on my earrings, my furniture, the drawing of the two cats I did that’s hanging above the stereo. I think she feels a little weird that she’s younger than me.”

“Why didn’t you invite me?”

“Because it was just supposed to be Dad, my friend and me, but at the last minute he asked if he could bring Elise.”

“You still could have invited me.”

“Billy,” she said gently. “I know that you still have a crush on her. I didn’t think it’d be a good idea.”

He was silent. It would be useless to lie to her. Elise was still on his mind so often, and he did little to try to forget her. She had acted in six movies, and another that hadn’t yet been released, and he had watched all of the six at least as many times, including
Bourbon at Dusk,
which he didn’t regret working on, despite the rift it had caused between his father and himself. If it hadn’t been for
Bourbon,
he wouldn’t have met Elise, who had been attracted to him too; he knew that for sure, especially after the last time he had seen her, which had been the previous May, just before she left for the Cannes festival with his father. Now she would not return his e-mails and had changed her cell phone number. Because of his feelings for her, he had ruined a relationship with a different woman he knew that he should have been happy with. She was smart and patient with him and had her own small but successful business. She was also very pretty and shared his taste in movies and music. He had botched it badly with Danielle, but there seemed no remedy for this because he had fallen in love with someone else. The most unfortunate thing about all of it was that the woman he’d fallen for was his father’s girlfriend, an enormous taboo if ever there was one.

“Which friend did you have over?” he finally said. “Jill? Celestine?”

“No, a friend from the hospital.”

“A boyfriend?”

She shook her head, but she was smiling. “No.”

“Who?”

“One of the attending physicians I work with.”

“What? Are you guys allowed to socialize outside of the hospital? I thought you told me that the attendings are like your bosses.”

“I can’t socialize with my boss?”

“Is he married?”

She laughed in a harsh burst. “Billy, stop it. You sound like Mom.”

“Sorry. You can tell me. Are you seeing this guy? I won’t judge you.”

Anna looked at him for a moment before looking away, her face coloring. “I think I’m in love with him, and I think he feels the same way about me. And yes, he’s married.”

So both he and his sister were romantic fools. He would never have imagined that she would allow herself to get involved with a married man. “Does he have any kids?”

She nodded. “Two. One’s a senior in high school, the other’s a sophomore.”

“Almost the same age difference as you and me.”

“Yes, I guess that’s true.”

“Where do you think this is going?”

“I don’t know. Neither does he. We’re just taking it one day at a time.”

“Everyone says they’ll do that, but I don’t know anyone who actually does. Except maybe for Luca.” His friend, like himself, did not need to work at any kind of steady job because he lived on inherited money, and since graduating from college five years earlier, he had spent time in France with his father and then in Australia with his mother, with intermittent returns to L.A. His profession was girls and leisure, he had said to Will, only half joking, his blithe attitude about their privileged status very different from Will’s, who felt a mixture of guilt and relief that he didn’t need to work at some dull job with people he wouldn’t have chosen to be with otherwise, but he also felt shame that he had no real profession, no “calling,” a word that had once struck him as almost religious in its gravity, as if some supreme being were summoning people and telling them, Moses-on-Mount-Sinai style, what they must absolutely do with their lives.

“I
am
taking it one day at a time,” Anna insisted. “I couldn’t do anything else even if I wanted to.”

Now, in Paris, he was sending e-mails to Elise again, telling her where he was, asking her to join him if she was in Europe or had a reason to come to Europe. He was acting without scruples, he realized, with these ongoing attempts to woo away the girl his father seemed to love, though he doubted that Renn was being faithful to her. As far as Will could tell, his father hadn’t been faithful to any of the women he had made a public commitment to, and it seemed unlikely that he would ever change this behavior for good, despite how beautiful Elise was, or how remarkable her talents.

From what Will could tell, truly talented actors had the ability to forget their insecurities, to be shameless and joyful in front of a camera and crew, to risk with a stony will other people’s laughter or derision. They also had to have the feeling, whether they acknowledged it or not, that people wanted to look at them, and that these people wouldn’t be able to stop looking. Elise might have been a little shy in her personal interactions with friends and acquaintances, but Will knew that she had a streak of exhibitionism in her too, as did his father. If the age difference between them hadn’t been so egregious, Will might even have thought that they were a good match. And, as much as he disliked doing so, he had to admit that his father could offer her things that he could not, especially when it came to her career.

What he himself could offer her might not be as extraordinary as what his father could give her, but Will knew that without question, he would be committed to her. He could offer her sexual fidelity, which, based on all precedent, his father could not. Will also believed that he could offer her sanctuary from the world his father and she publicly inhabited, one that often had its tentacles in almost all aspects of their private lives too. Not being famous the way his father was, Will did not have paparazzi following him into restaurants and stores or waiting on the street outside his house. He did not have a cell phone that rang twenty-five times an hour. He was his own person in a way that his father was not.

And so he persisted. He had never done such a thing before, never tried to poach some other man’s girlfriend. Despite his adherence to talk therapy’s dictum that doctors not tell their patients what to do, the previous summer Will’s therapist, Dr. Shepherd, had bluntly said: “You need to direct your energies elsewhere. You’ll only make yourself unhappy if you keep pursuing her. If she wants you, she’ll come to you. But even if she does, you must still consider your father’s feelings.”

Paris, two-thousand-year-old glittering city of lights, the Louvre, and the lovelorn, was the trapdoor through which he had plunged, hoping to escape from his disapproving therapist, his parents, his disappointments and jealousies. That he had escaped from some but not all of these things was a relief, but the heaviest burdens had remained with him. Before he left, he had told no one that he was going to France—not his sister or parents or the few friends he saw regularly—because he would not have been able to say how long he planned to stay or why exactly he was going, and he imagined them asking, Won’t you be lonely, not knowing anyone there (except for Luca’s father, who was busy with his own life)? His father had friends in Paris, and Will knew a couple of people from college who lived there too, but no one well enough to call a friend. It seemed best not to think too long about his motives because this was the first time in years, aside from his pursuit of Elise, that he had done something with spontaneity and an almost giddy sense of adventure. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein and Toklas, Josephine Baker, Alexander Calder—other adventurous souls had also escaped the sock garters and girdles and prudishness and fearful, unquestioning mediocrity of their hometowns for Paris’s salons and august boulevards, its verdant parks where art seemed to be created as effortlessly as California smog. He was not an artist, but it was possible that he would become one, or at least become something other than the floundering, directionless son of a famous man.

It startled him how easy it was too, once he set his plans in motion: he packed two suitcases, transferred money to an account he opened with the BNP, and gave away his houseplants to a neighbor. He had no pets and paid his monthly building assessments and utilities electronically. Luca was in L.A. when he left, but had put him in contact with his father, who had a friend willing to lease her apartment to him while she was away in Buenos Aires on diplomatic assignment. Will planned to return to L.A. in March for the marathon, but he would likely go right back to Paris afterward and run in the marathon there in April, running being the one activity that consistently filled him with a sense of elated contentment. During his runs, the near hopelessness of his feelings for Elise did not plague him. He didn’t know why he couldn’t simply force himself to stop wanting her, but his appointments with Dr. Shepherd had led him to the conclusion that he was a self-indulgent child. Also, that he was probably afraid of mature commitment, with the occasional sacrifices it required—it was safer to want someone you couldn’t have because you might fail to keep someone you could. Hence Danielle. Hence Sherrie and Luz and Melissa and Rian.

It was during his third week in Paris, at the end of January, that Elise acknowledged the two e-mails he had sent since arriving in France.

Dear Will,

I am happy for you. Paris is a beautiful city and I hope you’re doing well there. I’m sure you’ll be great in any of the marathons you run. I’m sorry you haven’t heard from me since we saw each other last May. I think you understand why it’s hard for me to be in touch with you. It would crush your father. Be well, Elise

P.S. If things were different, I would come to Paris and have dinner with you. I think I should tell you that your father proposed to me a couple of days ago. I haven’t said yes yet but I’m thinking about it.

P.P.S. Btw, thanks for your nice words about my Oscar nomination. I still can’t quite believe it. I know I’m not going to win, but I’m so excited to be nominated. One of us will win something though, I’m sure, with
Bourbon
getting eight (!) nominations. It feels like a dream sometimes. I wake up thinking about it in the middle of the night all the time now.

After reading her e-mail, which arrived just before midnight when he was about to go to bed, he put on his coat and went out into the quiet streets, where snow had started to fall, and walked across the city for three hours. It was a Tuesday night, and there were few people on the sidewalks and not many cars moving either. In his grief-stricken state, he still recognized that it might be dangerous to be out so late by himself in a city he didn’t know well, but he kept going and it made him feel better to be risking something, to be aware that his life might be taken from him if he didn’t care about it enough. He crossed the Seine and went southwest toward the locked gates of the Musée Rodin, then southeast to the tower in Montparnasse, before he turned north again and walked up through the crooked streets of the Latin Quarter, where more people were out than in the other neighborhoods he had passed through. He recrossed the Seine and walked to the Louvre, which at night looked especially like the impenetrable fortress-palace that it used to be, and then home again to rue Tiquetonne. He spoke to no one and felt his body’s strength and youthfulness and wondered why he could not stop wasting his life. He did not know why he couldn’t find anything that he wanted to do for a career, why his sister and mother both knew that they wanted to practice medicine or why his father had thought that he would be good and lucky enough to make a living as an actor. (And now he had those eight Oscar nominations. They weren’t a surprise, but Will had not felt very happy for his father when he found out about them, and his bitterness had bothered him more than the nominations themselves. How long would he and Renn be mired in this competitive struggle? It was horrible and pointless too—this was his father, not some grade-school classmate—but he did not know how or when it would end.)