by Andrea Meyer
“You okay?” he asks.
“Yeah, great, maybe a little distracted, but I’ve got a ton of editing to do today, it’ll keep me focused.”
I go back to my desk and call Luke Benton’s personal publicist first thing. The It Boy of the moment has uncharacteristically starred in a low-budget indie, Bad Rap, in which he plays a recently released convict doing his best to assimilate, and he’s really good. It’s the feature-film version of Anthony’s reality show, I make a mental note to point out to him. I’ve done everything but go to Benton’s publicist’s house and personally offer to give him a blowjob, and they’re still hemming and hawing over whether he can be our August cover boy. Our publication is small and underfunded, but everyone in the independent film business likes—and reads—it. The publicist’s flamboyantly blasé assistant says he’s in a meeting. I don’t leave my name, although I’m sure she knows my voice by now. I call Smith, another publicist who is handling the New York press for the film, a bitchy gay man I’ve been playing this game with for years, and beg a bit more. I tell him that if he gets me Luke, I’ll walk his dog, Foofy, while he’s at the Cannes Film Festival. I know I’m safe, because Smith’s live-in boyfriend, Pierre, doesn’t fly and is afraid to leave his angel for more than three hours. Foofy’s a Pomeranian who’s adorable, but yappy—and old and half blind. I RSVP to a month’s worth of screenings and cocktail parties and feel satisfied that my social calendar is full enough for me to weather Anthony’s absence.
Checking my e-mail while I’m on with Smith, the first message that appears in my box is from Clancy. I hold my breath and make myself ignore it until I’m off the phone. “Later, doll. Thanks sooooo much for pulling for me,” I tell Smith, hang up, say another petite prayer, and click on Clancy’s e-mail.
Hey you. LOVE YOUR PIECE. Putting contract through, call to discuss next assignment. Elated, I pick up the phone.
“Hey, Clancy, got your e-mail.”
“Yeah, loved it. Text is off to the printer.”
“Great. I’m so excited.”
“Any ideas for another piece?”
“I was thinking about something for your Takes Two to Tango section: ‘How to Spot a Commitment-phobe.’”
“Nice. A list? An essay? A reported piece?”
“I guess a kind of list: ‘Ten Ways to Spot a Commitment-phobe’? I’ll interview heartbroken friends, of course, but can you get me the number for some kind of shrink-slash-relationship-expert?”
“I’ll e-mail you Joanne Love’s info. She’s the best. Eight hundred words. Can you get it to me by the fifteenth? That’s two weeks.”
“Sure, no problem.” I hang up and do a little dance in my seat. Looks like I have proven myself to Luscious magazine. On my computer, I write:
1. He buys CDs you already have.
Anthony bought the new Beck the other day even though I have it. I got sullen and whiny, because I thought it meant we wouldn’t be living together for long, and he said I was crazy, he just wanted to take it on his trip to listen to on the plane, and when I said I could have burned it for him, he changed his story and said he forgot I had it. I still think he got it just in case we break up.
2. He doesn’t make an effort to meet your friends.
No big deal in our case—I mean it’s only been a month, for God’s sake, or a little over, but whatever. Now, Jake is a guy who couldn’t care less about my friends. Isn’t there some movie where the guy keeps the girl all alone to himself in their apartment and then in the end you learn he’s not a real boyfriend at all but one her imagination has cooked up and she’s actually insane? If it’s not a movie, it should be.
3. Beware of serial monogamy.
I guess it’s been on my mind lately. Let’s see, I’d better define the term.
A serial monogamist is a man (or woman, but for these purposes let’s focus on the male version) who goes from long-term relationship to long-term relationship, but never quite reaches “I do.” Relationships are a compulsion to this person, a security blanket that cannot be provided by flings or one-night stands, but they also have a shelf life usually determined by the love object’s ability to ride happily along without pressing for proof of long-term commitment. Serial monogamy is an insidious type of commitment phobia, because the perpetrator seems like the perfect boyfriend—loving, present, more than ready to spend weekends together, introduce you to his family, and tell you he loves you. Beware the man who opens himself up too quickly.
Wow, I didn’t even realize how insidious some of Anthony’s behavior seems until I came up with this story idea. He told me he loved me after less than a month, which must indicate some kind of mental imbalance, right? I mean, I feel like I love him, but to say it so easily means he’s said it before and often and clearly doesn’t need to take a relationship very seriously to define it as real.
4. He tells you he loves you too soon.
I remind myself that I’m only writing an article. It’s not like Anthony’s enthusiasm for monogamy is a sure sign that our relationship is nothing but a breakup in the making. There are loads of things worse than buying a Beck CD or saying he loves me. Maybe he does love me and just couldn’t keep it to himself anymore. Maybe he wants to listen to music that reminds him of me while he’s out of town, which is actually incredibly romantic! True commitment-phobes do terrible things. I’m suddenly reminded of that movie Once Around, where Holly Hunter is having sex with her boyfriend and bugging him about getting hitched and he tells her point-blank that he will never marry her. That’s a good one. Come to think of it, the guy in Days of Being Wild did the exact same thing.
5. If he says he will never marry you, that’s a very good sign he never will. I’ve always said men are simple creatures. When they say it, they mean it.
Hmm, what else?
6. Sleeping with someone else right before the wedding would be a pretty good indicator.
When Andie MacDowell has sex with Hugh Grant while engaged to that old Scottish guy in Four Weddings and a Funeral, you know her marriage is doomed. There’s this Spanish flick Lovers where a good Catholic boy who’s engaged to a good Catholic girl sleeps with Victoria Abril and she puts a string of love beads up his butt during sex, and he goes so crazy with desire to please her that when she asks him to kill his fiancée, he does it. That guy has a serious problem with commitment.
7. It’s probably not a good sign if your boyfriend plots to kills you.
I crack myself up.
8. Flirting with every other woman on the planet could also be a warning sign.
Check out Alfie or Truffaut’s The Man Who Loved Women. Or maybe it’s less fish-in-the-sea syndrome and more about restlessness, feeling an uncontrollable urge to move on to the next thing, like in Carnal Knowledge and Five Easy Pieces.
What is it about Jack Nicholson that cries out, “Cast me as a scumbag who is incapable of loving just one woman”? Same with Witches of Eastwick, Something’s Gotta Give. That’s a whole article in itself.
I e-mail Clancy and say that the piece might be more interesting if I relate each of my commitment-phobia red flags to a movie. It’s my area of expertise and it will be more original than most articles on the topic. She e-mails me back to say to go for it and send her a draft as soon as possible. She’s not entirely sure it will work, but would love to see what I come up with. She adds that I should probably include some expert testimony anyway, to give it credibility. She suggests having the expert analyze the afflicted fictional characters, thinks that would be a funny twist. I’m so fired up, I don’t hear Steve the first time he asks me whether I’ve heard back from Luke’s publicist.
“Sorry, got caught up in an e-mail. I’ll try him again right now.”
10
* * *
Seeking our dream house! We own our beautiful (but small) Chelsea duplex with 2 tiny bedrooms and are starting to think about trading up for a larger space with an extra bedroom. Outdoor space a must. Family-friendly locations (Brooklyn Heights, Cobble Hi
ll, Park Slope) preferable. Spacious closets, washer/dryer, dishwasher, good water pressure a must. NO WALK-UPS s.v.p. If you have any leads, sellers, brokers, please contact Samantha toute de suite! Merci beaucoup!
* * *
I’ve had a hard time sleeping ever since Anthony left town. It’s been almost three weeks and I’m experiencing my worst insomnia since a brief bout of postcollegiate existential angst that zapped my early twenties. He tends to call me when he gets home, which was around eleven o’clock the first week, but lately it has been closer to two. He and his crew are following Mikey, a delinquent seventeen-year-old with a racy nightlife, so almost every night they’re at parties or clubs in the sketchier parts of Chicago. Then they’re up at dawn, when this obsessive-compulsive girl, Delores, who is doing a better job of getting her life back on track than Mikey, goes jogging with her Shetland sheepdog Maggie Belle before school. On certain days she swims or practices tae kwon do in her front yard. Anthony’s favorite moment was when Delores slept in by mistake and threw a temper tantrum when she finally got up. I guess she actually picked up and threw the dog (she was fine) and then cried hysterically at her rash behavior. Her mood swings are making for great television.
The late-night calls are tough. He’s so amped after work, his energy seeps through the phone, leaving me rolling around and sighing a lot after we hang up. Sometimes I drag Lucy onto the bed with me, but her snoring and grunting don’t help. Tonight he called especially pumped up because Mikey was hanging around outside a convenience store where his friends loiter every night, drinking forty-ounce beers out of paper bags and doing skateboard tricks, and apparently one of Mikey’s friends had sold some kind of bogus white powder to this other kid for the price of cocaine and the duped guy turned up fuming. There was a huge brawl, with racial slurs blurted and blades pulled, like something out of The Warriors. The cops showed and Mikey’s friend got hauled in, but fortunately for Mikey, he escaped over the flimsy fence at the back of the parking lot. He’s on probation now and it could have been a big deal. Anthony was understandably excited about the footage he got: the action, the cuffs, the bad “your momma” jokes. When it heated up, Anthony called his second camera guy to rush over to the police station, while Anthony chased Mikey all the way home, where he was sweating and swearing and vowing to kill those guys if they ever messed with him again. Mikey doesn’t sound like a guy who’s too cognizant or concerned about the risks if he gets caught committing a crime again.
How the hell am I supposed to sleep after all this excitement? I throw my arm around Anthony’s pillow and do my best to picture him lying beside me with his arms around my waist. Instead, I keep hearing sirens wail and imagining Mikey panting his way down some Chicago back alley with Anthony on his tail. “Uuuh!” I say. I’ve got enough on my mind without this nonsense cluttering it up. Steve is applying pressure to put Kevin Smith on the cover of the magazine instead of my boy Luke. The overhyped indie icon has a movie coming up, the issue wraps in a couple of weeks, and it’s deadly not to have a cover story in place, but his bearded mug has graced our cover twice in the last three years and my gut tells me that Luke is going to come through for us. Whoa, I think, in a moment of revelation and sit up in bed to appreciate it: Stefan, my actor ex-boyfriend, went to school with Luke Benton! He knows him! They’re not best friends, but they meet for coffee to grumble about the business when he’s in town. Why didn’t I think of this before? I drag myself out of bed and find my cell. It’s two A.M., but Stefan picks up.
“I will call Lucas,” he says when I ask. “Right now. It’s early in L.A.”
Completely awake now, I go into the living room and plunk down on the couch. Lucy smiles up at me, happy to have company. I flip on the tube and walk around in my underwear picking up old newspapers and magazines that have been accumulating since before I got here and make a pile to keep and a pile to trash. Under the Sunday Times from six weeks ago, I find a videotape that’s been rented ever since. Jesus Christ, he can be a flake, I think. The phone rings.
“Luke will do the story,” Stefan says, very serious. “His people never told him they were considering it.”
“No way. They told us they passed on our request to him weeks ago.”
“Yes, he will call his publicist now and you will hear back from him in the morning.”
“Stefan, I love you. You’re the best.”
“Do you want to come over?”
“Tempting, Stef, but I’m living with someone.”
“I didn’t know.”
“It’s pretty recent,” I say and pause for a moment, waiting for him to ask for details, but he doesn’t. It always was all about Stefan. “Good night, Stefan. You’re a god.”
“Good night, Fluffy,” he says. He always called me Fluffy, with a maniacal grin on his face and a little shake of the head. Hard to believe I used to love this lunatic.
When I sleepwalk into the office the next day, Steve hugs me. Warmhearted as he is, Steve never hugs me. He never hugs anyone. “I don’t know how you did it,” he says, “but you did it. Smith called this morning. I guess Benton’s publicist called him in the middle of the night frantic because Luke is dying to be on our cover and he didn’t know if we still wanted him. Apparently he told his publicist”—Steve lowers his voice to mimic Luke’s famous drawl—“‘Flicks is my audience, man. It’s where I want to be. Especially when it comes to this movie, this little miracle that means all the world to me.’ Jacquie, you’re the best.”
Before I can respond with false humility, Sam interrupts. “Uh, well, I’ve got some news, too.”
Now what? She probably won the lottery.
Her face glows as she announces, bouncing up and down, “I’m, uh … prego! Enceinte! Yup, bun in the oven!” Total silence surrounds us. “It was a mistake, obviously, but we are so excited. It’s only been a month, so we’re not really supposed to tell anyone, but the thing is we decided to get married before I start to show too much, just to preserve the natural order of things—and because my mom insisted!” She throws her head back hysterically. “So we’re doing it right away, two weeks from Saturday, in this little restaurant in our new neighborhood. Everything’s changed. C’est fou, je sais! But exciting, too, n’est-ce pas? You’d better all still be able to come. We’re sending out invitations, like, tomorrow, but I wanted to let you all know.” She finally stops talking and bouncing and bows her head. I feel like we should clap or something.
“A pregnant bride. How totally Kill Bill of you,” Chester finally says, and he and Steve take turns patting her back while she giggles and squeals. An eerie sense of déjà vu creeps up over me.
“Well, uh, back to work!” Steve says. “We’ve got an issue to put to bed, and, Jacquie, you’re interviewing Luke Benton in two days at the Maritime. He’ll be in town doing long-lead press for the movie, so you don’t have to go to L.A. [Translation: Thank God we don’t have to come up with the cash to fly you there.] Get on the phone with Arjay to see if he’s available to shoot him. If not, call that British chick who shot Penélope Cruz for us.”
“I’m on it,” I tell him, fired up again. I check my e-mail, hoping that Clancy has gotten back to me. I filed my commitment-phobia piece yesterday and haven’t heard a peep. I think it turned out great. Our “love expert,” this kooky and very witty shrink appropriately named Joanne Love, psychoanalyzed people like Jack Nicholson in Carnal Knowledge and Michael Caine (and Jude Law) in Alfie. It was classic: She said that the character in Wong KarWai’s movie Days of Being Wild, a ladies’ man who throws out his lovers like yesterday’s teabag, had probably been rejected by his mother. She hadn’t even seen the movie, and that’s exactly what happened. Anyway, I’m proud of the piece and eager to hear what Clancy thinks.
I e-mail Anthony, asking him to please fly in for the weekend of Sam’s wedding. He’ll still be shooting in Chicago—the shoot keeps getting longer—but I figure he can take one Saturday off, and I’m dying to see him.
After work, Alicia, wh
o has been crashing with me a couple of nights a week since Anthony left, Lucy, and I hit the couch for a Luke Benton DVD marathon. Benton started out acting in a film based on a screenplay that he wrote himself, Sick from the Start, which was basically his life story, about a poor kid from the South working three jobs to support his ailing mother and two younger brothers. Years earlier, when Benton was seventeen, he’d been discovered in a diner by a scout who thought his ragged features put pretty boys to shame, and had been drawn into a world of money, drugs, and adulation that transformed him into a monster. He became one of those model brats the gossip pages adore, trashing hotel rooms, throwing very public hissy fits, and sleeping with and dumping every starlet and socialite from Madison Avenue to the Champs-Elysée. He crashed and burned by twenty-five, when he suddenly disappeared. It turned out that he had moved into the big beach house he’d famously bought for his mom in North Carolina, stopped drinking and started writing a screenplay, and, at twenty-eight, reemerged with Sick from the Start. And the world said, “Whoa, Luke Benton can act. And he can write.” From then on, he’s worked steadily. He got married (and divorced and married again), had a couple of kids, got divorced and married again (this is not a man who fears commitment), and has taken on about one film a year. My sister and I are watching the whole collection, or at least those we haven’t seen before. Anthony calls during an intense moment in his first big-budget film, Rage, where Luke is confronting his father (played by Clint Eastwood) about how he wasn’t there for him as a child and it’s his fault that he has grown up to be a bitter, uncaring man just like him. When the phone rings, my throat is tight and sore and ready for the unlocking of the floodgates.