After a while, we go back to the pavilion. Tucker’s replaced Dean at the rope. It’s getting later, and the crowd has thinned out a little.
Franca. Franca sits on one of the couches, entertaining a little throng of men and women. She has on a bright yellow jumpsuit now. I guess one outfit isn’t enough for an event like this. Her phone is at the ready, and she checks it every other second. Occasionally someone at her side must say something funny, because Franca lets out an odd, high cackle every so often.
“Todd.” I don’t know what to say to him, but I want it to be along the lines of Quick! Run!
His shoulders slump. “Oh, God, not her. I hate her teeth. They creep me out.”
He takes my hand, and we glide by the pavilion. As we pass Franca, Todd raises a hand in salute and calls out, “Franca! Darling! It’s too fabulous seeing you!”
He doesn’t even slow down. She gives a little half-wave, looks puzzled, and then turns back to her cadre.
I want to hug him. “I think we have something in common.”
He nods, but he looks around for someone else. “Where’s our mutual friend, the one we do like?”
I look for Andrew. He’s disappeared. He’s not on the dance floor. He’s not on the couches. My stomach flip-flops. Am I going to turn around and see him with someone else?
Todd must have read my face just now, which I suspect is not a hard thing to do, and he finds Andrew in a jiffy. “Oh, there he is.” He points to a table closer to the pool where Andrew smokes and talks casually with an older man in a suit. “He’s back to business—that’s one of the executive producers.”
I breathe out in relief. But I don’t like it, that worry. I want to trust him. The fact that I thought he might be off with someone isn’t a good sign.
“He likes you a lot. I wasn’t kidding that he’s told me all about you.”
This Todd might just be blessed with the gift of second sight. I needed to hear that right now.
“Sit with me,” he says. “We’ll have a drink, relax.”
I pat him on the hand. “I’m not much of a drinker. I think I’m going to bed.”
I can’t remember if I brought my little clutch up on the roof with me. I think about asking Tucker.
“Be sure to say goodnight to him, Kelly. Give him a break.”
“I’m doing the best I can. It’s hard. I’m not good at this.”
Todd strolls back to the couches and the young-looking girls who are lying in wait. “Maybe he’s not either,” he calls over his shoulder.
I see my clutch on the little table at the edge of the pavilion and retrieve it. Andrew’s still at the table with the producer. I don’t want to interrupt, especially if it’s business. And part of me kind of wants to make a point by leaving without saying anything to him. I don’t like having my feelings hurt.
I wave goodbye to Tucker. “I’m going to bed,” I mouth to him. He waves back.
I walk toward the elevator but stop along the way to slip my heels off. They will be relegated to the back of the closet in punishment for the beating they’ve given my feet this night.
I bump into someone as I stand back up. “Sorry.”
I turn around, expecting Andrew. It’s not. It’s Orange Girl, the one Andrew took for a twirl out on the dance floor. She sways visibly. Her mascara has slid south, giving her sweaty raccoon eyes. She is very drunk.
“What, bitch?” she asks me.
“What?” I stand with my shoes in my hand.
“What’s your problem?” She’s louder. Well, this should be fun.
“Goodnight.” I turn my back to her. There’s no reasoning with a drunk person. Time to leave.
“Hey!” She grabs at me and catches my shoulder, mostly by the cap sleeve of my dress. It tears off, and she takes a decent chunk of my skin with it, thanks to the dragon-lady nails she’s sporting.
“Ow!” I’d really like to kick her ass. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a girl fight before, but man, I am tempted.
But I’m also sober. And at least ten years older than she is. Let’s see, if I avoided dancing with my boyfriend to stay under the radar, would a bitch-slapping frenzy be a good idea? I chalk one up to my wisdom and experience and stay still.
And anyway, suddenly Tucker’s right next to me. This guy is good, I tell you what.
“It’s time for you to go home, miss.” He takes a step in front of me, shielding me from the drunken harpy. There’s a quick bustle. The bouncer from velvet rope number one suddenly has Orange Girl by the arm and escorts her to the elevator.
“Tucker, you are my favorite person in the world.” I lean into him. Maybe that instinct to hide behind him at the beginning of the night was a good one.
He stoops down and recovers the left sleeve of my dress. “Sorry, Kelly.” He looks at the skin on my arm. “She got you good. What a little monster.” He mumbles something into the microphone at his sleeve.
I touch my arm and realize I’m bleeding. “You’ve got to be kidding me.” I sit down on the half wall around the pool. What a night.
“Here.” A waitress has brought Tucker a white bar towel. He dabs at my arm with it.
“Geez, maybe we need to get you a tetanus shot. Or a rabies shot.” He laughs a little, and so do I. Things are ridiculous.
Suddenly I’m aware of a little circle of onlookers. They’re dissipating now, since the girl fight didn’t materialize, but a tall figure pushes through them and covers the distance to Tucker in a few long strides.
“What’s going on?” It’s Andrew. Todd saunters up behind him.
“Nothing. Some girl tried to get Kelly to fight her. She’s been escorted out of the party.”
Todd elbows him. “It was the drunk girl you danced with, dude.”
I look up in time to see Andrew see the blood on the bar towel. “It doesn’t even hurt anymore,” I tell him quickly. “It just bled for a minute there.”
His look is agonized. He doesn’t say anything. He puts his hands on top of his head, and he turns around and walks away. Todd follows him, but Andrew brushes him off. I can’t tell if he says anything before he disappears through a fire door.
I stand up. “Well, that was just awesome. I’m going to bed. Really. I have a plane to catch in the morning.” I throw the towel in the trash and stuff the sleeve of my dress into my clutch.
Todd and Tucker walk me to the elevator. “’Night, Kelly.” Tucker gives me a hug.
Todd rides down in the elevator with me. “Clearly she did not get the save-the-drama-for-your-mama memo.” He smiles and puts an arm around my shoulders.
“Ow.” He hits the shoulder the girl tore up.
“Sorry.” He pulls a cigarette from a pack in the inside pocket of his coat, tucks it behind one ear. “You know he feels responsible.”
“Yep.” I wonder if I hold him responsible. I think I’m still deciding.
“He’ll want to talk to you.”
“I want to go to sleep. He’ll have to wait.” I save the jab about only talking to sober people. It’s just mean.
“Okay.” Todd hasn’t seemed ruffled by anything that’s happened tonight.
“You’re one mellow cat, Todd Ford.”
“You’re one tough cougar, Kelly Reynolds.”
He walks me to my room. I go inside and go to bed. I set my cell on silent and take the hotel phone off the hook. I’m done for the night and fall asleep, hard.
I sit at a dining table, long and broad, wood warm and worn from use. I’m surrounded by a group of young men and women. I don’t seem to recognize any faces. They’re all having a good time—eating, drinking, talking, and laughing. Candles are lit, and a big feast is laid out on the table. Across from me is Peter. His hair is longer—wildly curly like when we were in college. His eyes sparkle, and he’s devilishly handsome. He wears his rowing sweatshirt, the one that was always my favorite. The one I stole and wore because it smelled like him.
Peter smiles, toasts me with his wine glass, drinks deepl
y.
I smile at him, raise my glass. Someone next to me laughs, too loudly—almost screaming with laughter—and a bottle of wine spills, streaming out across the table. I stand up as the red wine flows toward me. Someone tries to stop the flow with a napkin, but glasses are knocked over, more wine is spilled.
The laughing has turned to yelling now, and I can feel my heart revving up. I look over at Peter, looking for help, for reassurance.
He smiles at me in the middle of all the chaos, then takes another deep drink of his wine. He drinks so deeply the wine overflows the glass, pours down the sides of his mouth, his neck. It looks like blood running down his chest and leaves a wide stain in the sweatshirt, like blood blooming from a wound.
I wake up screaming, drenched in sweat. The hotel room is blank and silent in return.
The next morning I get in the shower, get dressed, and get packed before I get over to my cell phone to change the settings.
When I do, it’s clear I missed several calls last night from Andrew. Well, good. That was supposed to be an awesome night, and instead I relived the worst parts of my young adulthood.
I brush my teeth and worry. That stuff is all very far behind me, in my past. But I did it, I lived it. That was kind of par for the course.
How fair is it that I expect him to not be that way? Especially with the superhuman pressure he’s under. He’s supposed to skip all that stupidity because I’m tired of it? Maybe I’m not being realistic.
But the truth is, I don’t want to relive any of it. He’s welcome to live it, but I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be along for the ride. Besides, he’s twenty-nine. The days of college partying should be far behind him too. He should be done with that nonsense by now. Maybe the Hollywood scene is different, I don’t know.
But one thing I’ve learned (of the few things I know, because the list is short, trust me) is that it’s neither my responsibility to try to change Andrew nor my right to expect him to behave any differently. He is who he is.
I can’t help but feel downhearted. Things had gone so well between us. Almost magically. Okay, miraculously. This sucks.
I try to snap out of it. No relationship is without bumps in the road. He behaved badly last night. Maybe I was too uptight about the whole thing. Maybe I need to take a page from the Todd Ford playbook and chill about it.
There’s a knock at the door. I feel an immediate jolt of adrenaline. Here we go.
It’s him. His hair is wet. He wears a white tee and jeans with a thick black belt. He’s got on soccer shoes that are falling apart. Todd’s fashion sense is getting to him. He looks a lot younger this morning than he did in matinee-idol mode last night.
“Are you okay?” His eyes are wide with concern. They also tell me he didn’t sleep much last night. They’re rimmed red and have dark circles under them.
I swing the door wide, and he walks in, moving past me without meeting my eyes. I’m not ready to say anything. The ball is in his court on this one.
“Kelly, I’m sorry about last night. I was an idiot. You were right to have your guard up.”
“I wasn’t doing anything except what we agreed on: keeping a low profile.” I feel a little defensive, apparently.
“You’re right.”
“You were drunk.”
“I was stressed, I hadn’t had anything to eat, and then Todd showed up, and we just started pounding beers.”
“I’ve never even seen you drink.”
“If I’m shooting or prepping for a movie, I don’t at all. I actually haven’t in a long time…”
“All things in moderation.”
He stares at his feet, runs a hand through his wet hair. “Yeah. Not really my strong point, remember?”
“We’re still finding our way around being together. I get that. One night of partying is not a big deal. But the drama? I’ve done that in my life. And I am really, really over it.”
I stand. I hate this part. All I want is for last night to go away and for us to go back to getting along famously. But he doesn’t turn around right away, so I flop back down on the bed. A nap is in order right about now. I could sleep all of this away, maybe.
He turns around and comes to me, sits next to me on the bed. He reaches out, gently lifts the sleeve of my T-shirt.
Oh, that. Yeah, there’s kind of a bruise and a few bloody claw marks. I wince and pull the sleeve back down. “It’s nothing. Just a stupid girl. She was drunk.”
“It was a big deal. Last night was all my fault. I’m so sorry.” He leans over and kisses the scratches on my shoulder.
I’m losing focus. He looks at me. I put my hand on his cheek, kiss him. My whole body reacts to the feeling of him close to me. “We’ll do better next time,” I murmur.
I let go of the worry. Things have gone really well up to now. Last night was just a bump in the road. I’m trying not to overthink, I remind myself.
He kisses my neck. He kisses me on the lips again and slides his arm behind me, lowering me onto the bed.
Okay, I stand corrected. This is a better cure for our troubles than a nap. I close my eyes and try not to purr.
32: Media Push Comes to Shove
ANDREW IS TENDERLY ATTENTIVE to me the rest of the morning—carrying my bags to the car, making sure I have everything for the airport. He’s careful to kiss me goodbye and apologize again. But as I travel home, I find myself unnerved by last night’s experience. We have enough unusual complications. I’d like for that kind of thing not to happen again.
Unfortunately, we don’t have an opportunity for a do-over anytime soon. Andrew’s about to embark on the notorious and much dreaded media push: travel to Japan, London, Paris, Madrid, New York, and finally back to LA to do press for the movie. The premiere was one thing. Now he’s got two packed weeks of interviews and appearances.
This worries me.
I can’t imagine traveling so much in so little time. That in itself would suck the life out of me. On top of this, Andrew is expected to be charming and look fabulous all the while.
But he did say he does best when he has a schedule and clear expectations.
So I go back to driving kids to soccer and swimming and making lunches. At some point, I need to start concocting a plan for me. The domestic goddess thing works for now, but the boys continue to grow, and they’re threatening to eventually have their own lives separate from mine. Which will mean I won’t have anyone to ferry around anymore, and soon enough, no one will ask me to buy Skippy peanut butter instead of the store brand because it doesn’t have lumps in it.
And at that point, unless I’m planning on hoarding fifty cats and doing the crazy-lady thing, I will need something to do. I need something new, a new direction and purpose.
When I think about it at length, I get a headache, so very often I change the subject and obsess over my boyfriend instead. Andrew does his best to call, but his itinerary is head-spinning. Nevertheless, I think I’m doing a decent job holding it together with him on every continent and then some.
But I worry about how he’s holding it together. I catch some of the press coverage. There’s a website devoted to him that seems somewhat less rabid than most of what’s out there, and it posts pictures and clips of him in Tokyo, doing interviews and signing autographs. He looks tired.
In Spain, there’s a moment in the airport when the crowd overwhelms the security detail, and that gets some play on Entertainment Tonight. They seem to cover things in regard to Andrew with a spin that feels like they’re surprised he gets so much attention. They liken him to the Beatles—but with less of a reason for the fanaticism. The report doesn’t make me worried for his safety—I can make out Tucker by his side, leading him out a side door by the arrivals gate—but Andrew’s eyes look tired. Vacant. He looks like that distracted guy I saw in Ventura County when he was mad at Jeremy. When the crowd starts to surge, you can almost see him come back to his senses. He looks surprised as Tucker and airport security hustle him away.
T
hen he’s in New York, and I’m glad to have him back in the country. We talk on the phone and make plans about seeing each other, and it feels good.
But I’ve forgotten one thing—until I see it on the Internet the next day. New York is home to Todd, the animal, and of course the two of them hit the town.
Now that I know Todd, I don’t see him as a mustache-twirling villain who leads Andrew into dire situations against his will. But the two of them have a history together, and it involved getting up to no good. Sometimes high school friends bring out high school behavior.
The picture shows them hailing a cab. Innocent enough, but there’s a bodyguard—I can’t tell if it’s Tucker or Dean—who is very clearly holding Andrew upright, as he is plastered. The hooded eyelids are back. All the feelings from the night of the premiere come back to me.
I don’t like it. I have a bad feeling about all of this.
And it’s so odd, this voyeurism—following Andrew around the world from afar. Am I spying on him? It feels like it. I don’t often seek out information, but at the same time, I’m not avoiding it. I can kind of understand the claustrophobic feeling he describes sometimes. A fishbowl. He’s in it. Is it right that I’m there along with all the other cats, watching him swim? I don’t know.
So I try to keep the cattiness to a minimum and wait for him to come home to me. Or for the next thing to happen.
33: My Unfunny Valentine
THE NEXT THING IS VALENTINE’S DAY. After being married for forever, Peter and I kind of let each other off the hook about this. It never felt like a very real holiday, and in the dark of winter, finding a babysitter and fretting about the day was more a hassle than anything.
But I don’t know what to expect with Andrew. Part of me is a little excited. The grown-up part of me reminds the rest of me that Andrew is in the thick of automated dialogue replacement (ADR) from the sheriff movie and stuck in a studio for hours on end. The shoot for The Last Drive has wrapped, he’s done with the tour for Churchill’s Man and back in LA, but there’s still work to be done. After the drudgery of the media junket, this is not exactly the change he’s been looking for, and it’s not the satisfying work of acting either.
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