by T Cooper
The party eventually opened up to friends of the cast and crew, and it lasted all through the night and into the next morning. But I didn’t remember much after about 3 AM. Gisele dropped by with somebody she wanted me to meet, a model named Svava, new to town from Reykjavik. After splashing around in the grotto over several rounds of strong Tom Collinses, Svava asked whether I “liked skiing, or was it just a facade?” and led me back to my bedroom, where we started getting funny on the fur rug beside the electric fireplace. Svava was nothing like the women in Juggs, and I never imagined anything could be as soft as her skin; it was night and day from anything the guys on the boats described.
At some point I think I mumbled to Svava that I’d just fallen half-in-love with her, and then we passed out on top of a mountainous down comforter on the floor. When I woke up the next afternoon, Svava was gone—the only remnant of her a torn pair of black stockings draped suggestively over the flat-screen TV.
VIII
It was like entering the freaking Death Star or something, getting sucked in by a tractor beam. But with Leo playing Obi-Wan to my Luke Skywalker, I marched into the Creative Artists Agency building one afternoon a cub with a modest dream and came out a raging bruin, literally and figuratively flanked by a team of agents who promised to nurture me and my dream better than anybody ever had in my life.
Music to my little orphan ears.
Did you know they have a secret entrance at the DMV? I didn’t, but boy, when Leo is your designated driver, you go in through a private side door, and twenty-five minutes later (after satisfactory attempts at parallel parking, successfully indicating and completing your turns, and changing lanes relatively uneventfully), you drive off the lot blissfully, terrifyingly solo in your new Toyota Prius hybrid—tricked out with DVD player, built-in Bluetooth, satellite radio, leather seats, fresh custom rims, and my favorite touch: heated seats for when it gets chilly. In fucking L.A.!
The car was a gift from the producers of Separation of Oil and State, which was in post-production and still getting what many were calling, in hushed tones, “unprecedented buzz.” Apparently, the phones had started ringing for me at CAA, too.
“Who is Beaufort?” One of my agents’ assistant’s assistant called on my Blackberry to ask while I was driving on the 405 freeway between meetings one afternoon.
“Th-this is Beaufort?” I stuttered in the direction of my Bluetooth mic, which I was never confident actually picked up sound. All I could hear through the speakers was staticy cackling.
“No,” she said. “Who is Beaufort? Everybody wants to know.”
The night after our Rolling Stone cover shoot, Leo and I took the girls out to the Roosevelt for a private party. Svava was just back from Milan, and she was in one of her moods, disappearing frequently with some of the birds from The Hills into one of the V.I.P. guest rooms and staying gone for long spells at a time. But I was getting my drink on, and wasn’t going to allow anything to stop me from letting loose that night.
I decided to take a swim and for a nice long while floated happily in the middle of the glowing pool, listening to the frenetic cacophony of all the partiers. Watching the guys’ wallet chains twinkling, and the girls’ tight t-shirts straining to contain everything therein. Leo flashed me an ironic peace sign behind some guy’s back and raised a glass—it felt like the beginning of something.
Eventually Svava reappeared, teetering alongside her twiggy model friends, and as always when I saw her anew, I felt that flush in my chest when our eyes first met. “Over here, baby,” I hollered across the silky surface of the pool, trying to reel her in with one of my sexy looks she’d always said she likes so much.
She never came over though. So I just kept bobbing and watching. We left early. And Svava didn’t say anything to me for the rest of the evening, except one thing, right after the valet slammed the car door behind her: “Nobody actually swims at these things, Beaufort.”
IX
When things were good with Svava, they were really good. But when things were bad, it was lousy. All along though, our intimate life was a constant wonder. I’ll try to be a gentleman and maintain some modicum of discretion here, but: the girl was hot—and knew what she was doing. We made love for hours at a stretch, passed out in each other’s arms and then woke up and did it all over again. I never imagined two bodies could melt together like that, and she said she’d never been with a creature like me, that she couldn’t imagine ever wanting anything else. I never thought I’d hear anything like that from another being in my entire life. It was intoxicating, verging on addiction—and I can’t front: I was cuntstruck like the guys on the fishing boat predicted I’d one day be. Svava was nothing less than my whole world.
But eventually Svava’s focus strayed from me and honed in on herself, her body specifically, about which she said hateful things on a constant basis. I noticed new cuts and scars on her stomach from time to time, even though she tried covering them up with thick make-up and insisted she’d just been accidentally scratched on a couple rugged outdoor bathing-suit shoots. When we had sex, she asked me to make it hurt, and afterwards she’d get out of bed and stand in front of the full-length mirror, a blank expression like a white shade across her face. She’d tent her belly skin between fingertips and whisper robotically, “I think my butt’s getting big.” She started eating even less than she had been when we first met, and after work trips to Europe she came back toting more and more of the white powder we occasionally dabbled in on special occasions.
Every day, it seemed, was becoming increasingly “special” to Svava.
I tried to console her with stories about how where I came from, packing a little extra meat was an asset, a matter of survival, but it seemed only to inspire more rage toward me and self-loathing in her. Soon she stopped wanting me to touch her altogether, brushing me off with a half-serious, “Stop pawing me.” Which only served to make me feel inadequate, like what Svava really wanted was a “real” man again—the kind she’d always been with prior to me. When I’d intimate as much, she’d deliver an obligatory, “You’re the perfect boy for me”—and on my better days I almost believed her.
Still, after we ran into one of her exes—some surprisingly short reality TV host with spermicidally-frosted hair highlights and calf implants—at a club one night, I tortured myself for weeks afterwards. How his pillowy lips brushed her cheek when they hugged, how she giggled like an imbecilic school girl at that douche’s stupid global warming jokes and goofy dance moves, his “rounds of Smirnoff Ice for everybody!” I stood off in the wings watching it all, seeing so much red it eventually turned searing white behind my eyes. That hairless, muscular build, how his butt looked in saggy, ridiculously expensive designer jeans—things my body could never do or be. Is that what she wants? was the constant refrain in my brain.
Kabbalah helped all that. Svava came home the morning after one of our epic fights with a piece of red string and tied it around my left wrist in seven knots. She said she knew I’d experienced the ultimate rejection when my mother let me drift away from her on that ice floe, that it affected how I treated Svava, the first woman in my life after my mother. The red string technology was supposed to remind me that I could always look down and feel the warmth from the matriarch of the world, Rachel, whose greatest desire is to defend all of her children from evil.
At the Kabbalah center on Robertson I met so many other folks who were also struggling to understand past wounds and deconstruct histories of abandonment. Svava and I started attending regular classes and study groups together, and as a result started relating on a level we’d never before imagined possible. Demi and Ashton became mentors and “couples” friends. I’ll never forget one night out at the Ivy, when Demi leaned in close, put a hand on my forepaw, and told me that I might not know it then, but that soon I would need a spiritual inoculation against negativity and jealousy on the part of others, with which the bracelet would definitely help. That “Beaufort” would soon become a househo
ld name, and not to be surprised if the Evil Eye was soon to follow.
X
On the afternoon of our premiere, we all met up at Leo’s place, and the two of us poured a couple scotches while the girls finished getting ready upstairs. The producers wanted us to show up to the event in our Priuses, so I offered to drive because I’d just had mine detailed.
“Bro,” Leo laughed, “this is Sam, and this is Travis. They’re gonna drive us over there in both our cars.”
“Oh, duh,” I said, feeling stupid. Travis leered at me from beneath his tight, curly mohawk. And I think that’s when it hit me. How different everything was going to be from here on out. What Demi said. How life just changes in the flash of a klieg light like that. It seemed like I should be excited, but the revelation just filled me with about eighty percent anxiety and twenty percent sadness. I guess I was becoming quite a nervous guy back then.
“Fix your tie,” Leo said, jutting his chin toward my neck, and then I heard Svava’s heels on the stairs, and when I turned to look, she was simply radiant and I couldn’t take my eyes off of her, the uneasy heaviness in my chest replaced with pulses of something warm and syrupy swirling around inside. Then Svava did something she hadn’t in some time: reached over and squeezed my paw as we headed out the door to the cars. She didn’t actually say it, but it seemed like she was a little proud to be on my arm that night.
Leo snuck out before the screening began, but I saw the film for the first time all the way through. It was almost like watching a really good actor playing me, but the handshakes and pats on the back at the after-party confirmed it was indeed just little me from the Beaufort Sea up there on that screen. “Surreal” doesn’t begin to describe it. And the reviews were, well, I was quite honored by the bulk of them …
AUTHENTICITY ON A SCALE HERETOFORE
NEVER CAPTURED ON CELLULOID.
DICAPRIO AND THE NEWBIE BEAUFORT SIZZLE
IN THIS COOL NEW FLICK.
BEAUFORT PUTS A FORMIDABLE YET ARTFULLY
SUBTLE FACE ON CLIMATE CHANGE.
WHERE’D THEY FIND THIS GUY? BECAUSE
IT CERTAINLY WASN’T CENTRAL CASTING.
When I pulled up to my favorite newsstand in West Hollywood on the morning after the premiere, the hoary (and usually grouchy) owner came striding over to my car before I even had a chance to throw it in park. He shoved three or four magazines through the window—in addition to Rolling Stone—on which a shirtless Leo and I shared the cover. He refused to take my money. I sat in the car with the windows up, inhaling the dry heat and flipping through all the glossy, perfume-infused pages: my muzzle looked a little big on Men’s Journal, the pin-striped waistcoat and pink pocket-square a little ridiculous in GQ, and I thought my fur seemed a little washed out inside Details, and—WHAT THE FUCK?
“But I never said my dad split when I was born, or that I grew up in the projects,” I whined to Leo over the phone. “I just said that times were lean and I didn’t see my father much.”
“Did you say ‘starving’?” he asked. “Did you actually use the word?”
“I don’t know, maybe. Maybe I said I had friends who were starving—”
“Whatever, don’t sweat it,” he interrupted. “Par for the course. Just watch what you say from now on.”
So I did.
XI
The next week, CAA called with offers for three films over the next six months. And those were just the ones they thought worthy of my consideration. When the news came, I was still in bed watching World War II naval aircraft documentaries, and Svava was taking a steam shower—I could hear it hissing on and off for what seemed like hours. I quickly scheduled a few meetings for the next morning, and as soon as I hung up the phone went in to tell Svava the good news. My nose twitched at the overwhelming smell of eucalyptus when I nudged open the bathroom door.
I could tell something was wrong the second I spotted steam pouring out of the seams around the shower door. I couldn’t see Svava’s body through the glass—I couldn’t see anything—but when I pulled open the door, she materialized through the haze, sprawled across the blue tile floor.
“Beau,” she mumbled. “My funny little beau-beau!”
“Oh my god, call 9-1-1,” I hollered, “call 9-1-1!”
“I’m fine,” she said adamantly, pulling herself up onto the bench, all bony elbows and knees. “And who the fuck are you talking to?”
I gestured at her face.
“What?” She was getting angry.
I touched a paw to her nostril and withdrew it, so she could see the spot of blood on my fur. “It’s nothing,” she slurred, wrapping herself in a big white towel and disappearing into the walk-in closet.
When she woke up a few hours later, I convinced Svava to cancel her plans for the evening and stay in with me. I suggested I’d whip up some wheatgrass omelets and millet smoothies at the house, so that we could just hole up and unplug from it all and watch trashy DVDs all night: Showgirls, Youngblood, Born on the Fourth of July—a regular howl-fest. When she reluctantly agreed, cracking just a sliver of a smile, I jumped into the car and headed down the hill to Whole Foods, before she could change her mind.
I was perusing the fresh seafood and spotted some salmon that looked pretty good. For salmon. “So, is this wild-caught?” I had just asked the fishmonger, when I heard the most piercing screeches imaginable, coming from somewhere behind me. I didn’t know if it was animal or human or vegetable or what, but then two teenaged girls approached, all shakes and quivers.
“Can we get a picture with you?” the larger of the two asked, starting to cry.
“Uh, sure,” I said, taking the wrapped salmon and tossing it into my cart. I put an arm around one girl while the other aimed a cell-phone camera at us.
“Do you know Nick Jonas?” she asked, squeezing in closer.
“Nope.”
“What about Zach and Cody?”
“Who?”
“Miley?”
“My turn!” the other one said, handing the camera off to the one I’d just been photographed with. Before I knew it, the new girl put her arm around me and her breasts were pushed up against my flank, and they were so large and insistent, and I don’t think she could’ve been a day over thirteen. What do they feed kids these days, anyway?
XII
BEAUFORT: CAN’T KEEP HIS PAWS OFF THE JAILBAIT
Before I even slid the salmon out of the oven, those goddam photos were burning up the internet, and my cell was ringing non-stop with calls and texts. Svava’s, too. One of her friends even e-mailed a picture, and when I went to fetch her for dinner, I found Svava hunched over the laptop in my office, furiously clicking through the story on TMZ.
“Nice. Really nice, Beau.”
“What?”
“You’re such an idiot,” she spat. “It says here other customers saw you touching this girl’s privates ‘inappropriately.’ ”
“Come on—”
You think it’s a huge conspiracy, they’re all lying?” she shrieked.
“Can we talk about this like reasonable people? These girls just came up—I was minding my own business in the seafood section.”
“I don’t care if you were in the fucking tofu aisle!”
“You actually think I was scamming on some twelve-year-old with huge boobs?”
Needless to say, I ate alone that night. And Svava called her agency to be booked on a job starting in Paris the next day. She completely iced me out, and it felt more familiar than I was willing to admit right then. I didn’t know if or when I was ever going to see the girl again. And the thought paralyzed me.
After three days of not hearing from Svava and attempting to cope by abusing a few Value-Pak sized bottles of cherry Nyquil and neglecting to get out of bed for anything—not even food—my agents convinced me to take a meeting with Nicole Kidman about The Golden Compass 2: The Return of Whimsy. She and the producers wanted me to reprise the role of the armored warrior bear. They wanted to abandon animat
ion for the character, and they were willing to pay handsomely for it.
At the meeting I got the full-court press, with seal-meat sushi, imported fresh by private courier jet from The Beaufort Sea, and elaborate film clips and projections and figures and promises of an even more central role in the final installment of the trilogy in a couple years. In the middle of the session I glanced over at my agent, and he was smiling so smugly and nodding his head blindly to everything that was being said, practically already calculating his fucking commission on the deal. For fielding a few phone calls, reserving the boardroom, and texting his actress/waitress/model girlfriend while nominally “taking” this meeting with me.
But I wasn’t impressed by any of it. And it wasn’t a done-deal like everybody assumed. Like I’m some neophyte from the tundra drooling uncontrollably whenever a few stacks are waved in front of my disadvantaged eyes. In fact, I didn’t really give a shit, and all I really wanted was to take another nip of Nyquil and climb back in bed for the rest of the afternoon and week, month, year.
As the meeting wound down, Nicole sensed my ambivalence and turned to me, earnestly declaring in that phony, reedy voice of hers: “I believe this role was made for you. And you were made for it.”
“Just think about it,” one of her producers added by way of punctuation.
“Oh, I will,” I began, sighing. My agent shot me a look, the first time he’d registered anything all afternoon. “But I’m just not sure I want to be typecast as a polar bear for the rest of time.”
Everybody shot looks at one another across the table, like, Well, what the fuck are you then? And it was so obviously limiting and condescending and showed such a lack of faith and imagination, and it made me want to throw up a middle finger to each and everyone of them, more than sign on any dotted line.