Movie Star By Lizzie Pepper (21 page)

Since pairing up with Rob, I had learned to avoid making eye contact in public. It kept people at arm’s length. But when we entered the parenting class I couldn’t help glancing up furtively to scan the small, colorful room. My gaze swept across a cascade of averted eyes, every last mom pretending not to recognize me, pretending they hadn’t been staring. Not the finest bunch of actors I’d ever met. I half appreciated their effort and half wished they would just stare until they got it out of their systems. The sets of twins, many of them in matching outfits (Really? People still did that?), were mercifully oblivious, so I focused on them and plastered a mild, noncommittal smile on my face.

There were about ten moms in the class, including me. We sat in a circle, each of us trying to keep both of our kids in our laps for the entirety of a chipper hello song. There was one mom who had brought her triplets. She looked perfect, every hair in place and a beatific smile on her face and I couldn’t help assuming she’d hit some psychopharmaceutical jackpot. After an absurd attempt at mother-child Pilates (“Pick one of your children—the ‘good’ twin. Ha, ha.”), we let them run around knocking over a herd of inflatable plastic horsies. (Or, rather, most of the children, including Leo, knocked them over. Cap waddled around carefully standing them back up.
That’s my boy,
I thought.)

Because it was the first week, the teacher, Jamie, asked us to go around the circle introducing ourselves and saying what was going on with us and our children. The first few moms mentioned sleep issues; one baby liked to throw her food to the floor when she was done eating; one mom burst into tears because she still wasn’t back to a size zero, and her husband had only ever known her as a zero, and breast-feeding made her so hungry she’d eaten a
whole bagel
(gasps of horror from the assembled), and this new, size-four body felt
huge
and
clumsy
.

My turn was approaching. I had a hundred concerns: My husband is always traveling; the children and I are prisoners in our own home; my
nanny hates me; I’ve lost my closest family and friends; my sons can’t possibly have a normal childhood. I wanted advice—for the boys’ sake more than my own—but I couldn’t trust these women. Or anyone. Instead, I positioned myself, just like I did in every magazine profile: Lizzie Pepper, Girl Next Door. Experience told me to pick a problem that made me come across as a responsible mom who had authentic, relatable concerns, but was too boring to be tabloid fodder.

I said, “Does anyone know which plastics are safe? And whether it’s okay to put them in the dishwasher?”

After class, one of the moms came up to me as we were leaving.

“Your sons are adorable,” she said. “What are their names?”

Cap and I were waiting on the sidewalk as Lala buckled Leo into the car. “That one’s Leo, and this one is Cap.”

Her daughter, Olive, grabbed a hunk of Cap’s hair and pulled it toward her mouth. Cap watched with a look of detached curiosity, as if he were conducting a study of the behavior of young human children.

The mom knelt down next to her daughter and cooed, “Olive, Mama understands that you want to eat that little boy’s hair, don’t you, clever girl? If you are hungry you can have an organic apple wedge. Right now you’re hurting the little boy’s body. Mama is going to help you stop hurting the little boy’s body.”

She put her hand on Olive’s hand and tried to pry her little fist open. “May I have permission to touch your body? Mama is opening your hand now.”

Olive looked at her mother placidly, then opened her mouth and screamed at the top of her lungs, “Noooooooo!” She held tight to Cap’s hair.

Now Cap was alarmed. The mother was on one side of him and Olive on the other. He held his hands straight out to me and whimpered, “Mama!”

The mother pried, Olive screamed, and Cap’s bottom lip began to
tremble. I knelt down in front of him and said, “Just a minute, honey. It’s going to be okay.” Thinking fast, I took a breath mint out of my purse and said, “Here, Olive. Want a candy?”

Olive’s eyes lit up. She instantly released Cap and smiled. “Yummy!”

I picked up Cap and turned to the mother with a smile of shared sympathy so that she knew I wasn’t judging her child. They all had their moments. But to my surprise the mother was staring at me, horrified.

“You bribed Olive!” she exclaimed. “And we don’t do processed sugar.” She swept Olive up and stormed away. That was my first and last Double the Fun class.

Next I hired a music teacher to come to our house. I asked Meg to invite the children of a few other actor moms. We had a little class of five. The music teacher, Bliss, always said they were her best-dressed class. Then Bliss sold pictures to
Rounder
and moved to Tulum, and that was the end of that.

The life I once lived, and the new life I’d imagined, seemed farther and farther away.

F
or the boys’ second birthday, Lala and I took them to Prague to visit Rob on location for
The Search for Helen Grant
. The production had given Rob the top two floors of the Hotel International, but he was using only the presidential suite and the service elevator, which the hotel seemed to have hastily draped in cheap velvet in his honor. They’d cut a rectangle out of the fabric for access to the elevator buttons.

As soon as Lala left to put the boys to sleep in their suite, Rob threw me to the bed.

“I need you,” he said, covering me in kisses, dispelling in an instant the loneliness of his absence. I needed him, too. My vision of our marriage, our family, our future included a partner. A grown-up to share my worries and stories and bed. Our relationship was turning out to be far more long-distance than I’d anticipated. But what choice did we have? He was my adventurer, my expedition-bound husband whose travels pulled us apart but were inextricable from who he was.

“Wait, wait! I brought you a present,” I said. It was a small pencil-and-ink canvas, a nude reclining on a bed with a cloud of blue hair. (I’m telling you—it isn’t easy to get presents for Rob Mars.) I’d carried it carefully on the plane, mummified in bubble wrap. Now I took a nail clipper and
struggled to cut through the stubborn plastic cord that the gallery had used to secure the package.

“Here, let me—” Rob said. Just as he leaned forward, the cord snapped free, catching him right in the eye. “Holy bejeezus!” he yelped, falling backward on the bed with his hand clenched to his eye.

“Oh my God, are you okay?”

Eye squeezed shut, he said, “I am totally fine. Did not need that eye for the major motion picture I am shooting tomorrow.”

“I am so sorry,” I said.

“Just come here already.” He pulled me down on the bed next to him. “If I can’t see you, feeling you will do.”

I laughed. “Did you actually get hit in the eye or are you faking it to get me in bed?”

He rolled on top of me. “I’ll never tell.”

Our reunions were always passionate—it’s something I never want to forget, for our sake and the boys’.

Afterward, he gazed at me (for the record, his eye: completely uninjured) and said, “Now, about that present . . .”

I shrugged. “It’s a Picasso. Whatever.”

Rob’s call time the next day was at six a.m., Eastern Bloc Time. The boys were insane with jet lag. Leo was wired and pulling Lala in all directions, while I carried Cap, a grumpy two-year-old lump, to the set.

I had always loved being on location—the camaraderie, the intensity, the lifetime supply of M&Ms—although I didn’t exactly pick the best day for my return. Today they were shooting the scene where Rob first teams up with a female scientist to look for Helen Grant, a dying woman whose singular cancer genome holds a possible cure for leukemia. Par for the course, “teaming up” meant hooking up. This female scientist just
happened to be played by Wendy Jones, who famously ditched her squeaky-clean Disney image by guest-starring on
American Dream
as the vixen to my good girl. The PR machines had cast Wendy as one of my dearest friends, but she was not—not since the end of season three, when she’d attempted to seduce my real-life boyfriend, then casually apologized and commended his honor, saying “Very impressive. Justin wouldn’t cheat. He said he wouldn’t trade quality for sexy.” (It went without question that I was the Madonna in that equation and therefore the antithesis of sexy.) Wendy, who had once been tied to Rob in the tabloids, was cast as his love interest in this movie. Awesome.

The scene currently being shot had them walking down the street, arguing about whether Wendy’s character could have her turn to drive the car. (He thinks he’s a better driver because, you know, she is a
woman
. Just because Rob had his pick of films didn’t mean he could or cared to avoid the sexist clichés.) Finally, she says, “How do you plan to drive without the keys?”

Rob pats his pockets, confused.
Where did those damn keys go?

Wendy dangles them in front of his nose. “Looking for these?”

Having outwitted him, she’ll get to drive. Cue the hot public makeout that will cut to them in bed together.

I watched several takes of this riveting scene, by which point Cap desperately needed a nap. While Lala entertained Leo, I spent two miserable hours in Rob’s trailer failing to get Cap to sleep. Eventually, he crashed on my shoulder as I walked around the parking lot. Afraid to put him down, I returned to the set, where I stood bouncing gently, rocking from hip to hip. I tried to think of it as my workout for the day.

They broke to relight the scene, and Rob brought people over to meet me. I jiggled Cap as Rob introduced me to the director and the producer, and I was still jiggling him when I said hi to Wendy, her perfect body sheathed in a tight red Bond girl–worthy dress.

“This must be your son. Adorable,” Wendy said.

“Thank you,” I said.

“And you look amazing! I can’t even tell you had a baby.” (Two babies, but who was counting?) It didn’t matter what Wendy said—we both knew the truth. Unlike me, Wendy had successfully made the transition from teen TV ingénue to leading lady. A movie star. Her eyelash extensions were freshly done; she had the glowing skin of a woman who does all the maintenance I’d dropped when the twins were born; the whites of her eyes were flawless—evidence of a recent Master Cleanse. Meanwhile, the shadows under my eyes had aged me ten years, and Cap, sleeping on my shoulder, had dragged my shirt down my shoulder to reveal the wide strap of a graying nursing bra. It was my least favorite part of being a female actor: that eternal youth, beauty, and style were critical to the job. Another downside of picking a career as a teenager. I never thought about how I would age into it, and even if I had, I was too young to care. My parents might have considered it, but they had other goals in mind. One benefit to having boys was knowing they were less likely to be judged for their appearance. My sons would choose their own careers, and they would almost certainly find themselves in professions that required brains, not beauty.

I boosted Cap in my arms, pulled my shoulders back, straightened my posture, and tried to fix my shirt. Wendy Jones felt sorry for me. And for once I agreed with her. I had never been more famous, more talked about . . . and more alone. The movie set on which we stood was an illusion: The leaves on the trees were paper; the getaway car drove itself, fixed on a track. My husband wasn’t a con man; Wendy wasn’t his lover (as far as I knew); her real eyelashes weren’t three inches long. But everything here was scheduled and scripted. There was a beginning, a middle, and an end. There were no plot holes or loose ends. Meanwhile I was isolated and lost, and for the first time I started to think that the set—a place
where I was a central player—was, for all its smoke and mirrors, a reality I wanted back in my life.

Something was missing. Whether it was being an actor, being with my husband, or being Lizzie, not Elizabeth—all the pieces of my life had been shaken up and had then resettled such that I no longer recognized myself. My identity—the child who’d made snow angels in her backyard; the girl who’d explored the outskirts of Memphis; the hardworking actor who wasn’t sick once in six seasons; the young woman who’d fearlessly teased Rob Mars; and everything else that made me the person I’d thought I was—it had all collapsed into a shadow. I finally acknowledged the feeling that had been growing over the past two years. I was a movie star’s wife and a mother, and nothing more. My role was to circle the widow’s walk, waiting and hoping for my long-lost shipman to return to port. Reuniting with Rob reminded me that I had a husband, and a very handsome, loving one at that—but it wasn’t enough.

That night Rob and I walked across Charles Bridge. The cobblestone span was lined with baroque statues, in front of them vendors hawking souvenirs. Reflected light darted restlessly on the river below as if searching for anchor.

“It’s not working. Being with the boys full-time,” I blurted out. “I think I miss acting.”

“Oh! I thought you decided to take a break from acting,” Rob said.

“That was almost three years ago. Now . . . I don’t know.”

Rob stopped to buy the boys two marionettes. They cost Kc375 each—about twenty dollars—but Rob gave the seller a Kc1,000 bill, refusing change. The vendor ran after us holding out a third marionette. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to sell us another or give it to us since we’d paid extra. The other vendors took notice. Now that we’d made a purchase, they converged with various souvenirs in their hands.

“No, thank you,” Rob said, and made a mistake: He smiled.

Someone yelled “Rob Mars! Rob Mars!” Faces turned toward us and began to converge.

Being Rob Mars. That was it, the pinnacle of success as an actor. I somehow thought that being his wife, joining his organization, having his children, would put me right up there next to him, but, close as I was to him, he still had something that I wanted.

“We’d better turn around,” Rob said. But the crowd was now thick with people holding out scraps of paper and squeezing next to us so their friends could take pictures. There was no escaping—Rob stood a full head above the crowd. We stopped, spent fifteen minutes posing and giving out autographs, then made our way to the hotel as quickly as we could.

Safely back in our room, Rob said, “I think it’s wonderful that you’re spending so much time with our sons. My job—it pays the rent. Big deal. What you’re doing is much more important.”

“Oh yeah? Wanna trade?”

“We can talk about that.”

I gave him a skeptical look.

“I’m serious!” he said. “It’s really important for kids to be raised by their parents. I always went to my mom’s office after school, then home with her for dinner. It was great.”

He and his mother were close, allegedly, though I had yet to see evidence of it. Rob shared few stories from his childhood, and they all ended with the same blanket summary. “It was great.” But was it? It seemed to me that the greatest memories defied generalizations. Mine were household traditions—like helping my father reshingle the garage roof or washing the window screens together every spring. They were awkward or embarrassing moments—like throwing up in a houseplant as a sophomore at a party full of seniors or playing truth-or-dare on the beach or dancing to “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” on the tables of
a Tennessee bar. Rob’s stories, whatever they were, had been whitewashed into oblivion by too many years of interviews and sound bites. And now, when it came to raising our sons, I found I had no idea what his childhood was really like, or whether it was remotely useful as a model for our children’s.

“I want to be at home with them, I do, but I left so much behind . . .”

“So move forward with a movie. Or stay with the boys. Or commit to investigating other options.” I don’t know which came first—the One Cell Practice or his decisive mind—but they fused into a resolute, unflappable wall. I felt cornered. I didn’t want to be in this discussion, where I was supposed to choose between acting and mothering, right at this very moment. Seeing my expression, Rob softened. “That sounded cold. I just mean that the world is your oyster. Whatever you want, we can make it happen.”

The boys were playing with the marionettes on the hotel floor, the strings that controlled them already hopelessly knotted. Cap’s was a peasant girl with short, yellow braids. Her arm was twisted up and above her shoulder.

“Fix!” he wailed, throwing her into my lap. While I worked to free her, and Rob and I talked, Cap kept pleading “Fix! Fix!” with increasing desperation.

“I know I have infinite options. That’s part of the problem. I’m just not sure . . .”

“Okay, so we’ll think about it. There’s no rush.” Rob’s voice was soft and comforting, but I saw his neck tighten. He couldn’t stand dithering. For some reason Lexy Hartfield, Rob’s ex-wife, popped into my head. After their marriage she had vanished from the industry. Lexy, the great beauty and widely respected actor, gave it all up, never to return, not even after the divorce. But why? She had no children to occupy her, no new career to my knowledge. I remembered the note she’d sent me when Rob
and I got engaged. “This above all: to thine own self be true.” Had she quit acting in order to be true to herself? Or was it the other way around? Was she warning me not to follow her path?