by Josie Brown
“You would have made it ‘across the pond’ eventually. It was your fate. I know these things. I study the stars, remember?”
We’d moved from coffee mugs to beer tankards sometime during the unofficial happy hour of four o’clock. The fickle British sun, now fully encased in heavy dense clouds, merited the switch. I was not used to thick dark British beers (let alone thin, pallid American ones), and I could feel my tongue get furrier with each sip.
“To paraphrase the Bard, ‘the fault, dear Hannah, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves if we are underlings.’ ” He stared at me for just a second, then glanced away. His slap-happy grin couldn’t disappear as fast, though. “You’re an odd dolly bird, for Hollywood anyway, you know that?”
“In what way?” I demanded to know. Later I’d try to tell myself that it had been the beer that had made me belligerent, but of course I knew better. In truth, I was upset that he was so right, for so many reasons: I wasn’t your usual Hollywood hottie, Malibu Barbie, or California surfer girl. Still, no woman wanted the obvious thrown in her face: that she didn’t fit in.
Louis almost choked on his foam, he was laughing so hard at my reaction. “Don’t get me wrong. You’re certainly pretty . . . enough.”
Enough? What, now there was a standard to be met?
But of course, in Hollywood there’s always a standard . . .
“I’m not being cheeky. I mean it—and not in a bad way at all. In fact, I think your ordinariness is your most attractive feature.”
“What? I don’t get it.” The fact that I wasn’t pretty enough for Hollywood made me attractive? To Louis?
He took another sip of his beer before answering. “What I’m trying to say is that you’re—well, you’re not plastic. You know, not fake.” He leaned in close—so close, in fact, that I could once again feel his breath on my face.
It felt warm. And nice. So much so that I felt it was worth staying awake for.
“You have real lips, not the blow-up-doll kind. Granted, your eyes could be just a bit larger—” he paused to scrutinize me more carefully—“And your hair… well, frankly, I like the fact that it’s that—that sort of gingery brown color. Although maybe it could use a bit more red, too.” He squinted to make sure, but there wasn’t much light coming in through the café’s windows. “You know what I mean—it’s not just another shade of brass. And I must say, I find it refreshing to have finally met a woman in Los Angeles who doesn’t spend every waking minute in some salon, or doesn’t have an entourage of stylists trailing after her. The way you let it run wild all over the place—very Botticelli . . . well, okay, more like pinkie-finger-in-light-socket, but it seems to work. On you, anyway.”
I snorted so hard that beer went up my nose. “Thanks. That’s just what I needed: confirmation from Cosmo’s ‘Hottest Hunk’ that I’m a total loser.”
“I think you know better than that.” All of a sudden, his voice got serious. “You’re—real. Sure, your nose may be a bit too… ‘pert’ is the word, right?”—He traced the pertness with a tapered finger—“And it’s obvious that those are your real breasts—” His hand may have stopped, but his gaze hadn’t. “Just the fact that they aren’t anywhere near Hef’s minimum is a dead giveaway that it’s all you… I mean, I hope you started with at least that—”
Shaking my Botticellian mop, I warned him, “Watch it, pretty boy. You’re treading on thin ice.”
“Oh, don’t I know it.” He leaned back, but he didn’t let up by any means. “And I like the way that you’re always game to try something new, even though, as we’ve discovered, you have a propensity toward mucking things up. Most women in Los Angeles would rather play it safe. Then there’s your very charming habit of speaking your mind, even at the most inappropriate times. Hmmm… and I find it endearing that you’re not worried about breaking your face by laughing. What’s truly more amazing is that you even laugh at yourself.”
I groaned out loud, just thinking about the wrinkles he was counting in the corners of my eyes. What was he truly dishing out: adoration, or insults? I was too tipsy to tell.
Whatever it was, though, it was too embarrassing to hear him continue.
“Enough already! Before this dissertation once again veers onto the subject of my gap-toothed grin, or how pigeon-toed I am, or the fact that my legs are too skinny, or that my elbows are too bony, or my ass sticks out too far—”
“As a connoisseur of the fairer sex’s bum, I can assure you that yours is currently elevated quite nicely.” He stopped and leaned outside the table. “But to make doubly sure, might I suggest we hasten back to the Lanesborough to measure its distance from the ground?”
“I’ve got a better idea.” This I practically purred at him. “What say we complete our game of Twenty Questions?”
He blinked twice. “I thought we had.”
“No, not really. You forgot to answer the very last question.”
“Refresh my memory.”
“On the plane, you had asked me what I considered were the traits of the ideal man. But you never answered that question yourself.”
“Why, I’m the ideal man. For every woman, of course.”
“I’m sure you think you are, but you know very well that’s not what I’m asking! I want you to describe the ideal woman.”
“I remember answering that very question in the ‘Actor’s Studio.’”
“No, you answered a question about your ideal leading lady. And, if I remember correctly, you stole my answer when you did. So, now it’s time for the real answer.”
He rose slowly and motioned the waiter for the check, but I made it obvious that I wasn’t going to budge until he answered. After handing the waiter a £100 note to clear our tab, Louis then sat back down, took both my hands in his, and looked me right in the eye.
“But I just gave it to you, Hannah dear, when I described you.”
* * *
The conversations that took place every fifteen minutes or so between the hours of eight and eleven o’clock the next morning between me and the director of Rebecca, Dorian Lancaster (né Dragomir Levanat, an obviously fully Anglicized Croatian émigré), were a near-complete primer on the most colorful phrases in contemporary British slang.
Take, for example, bang out of order, which means totally unacceptable. (As in “It’s bang out of order for that bastard prick boss of yours to blow off this final dubbing session!”) Then there is bugger it, mad for it, nadgers, and galloping knob-rot. (The first term expresses frustration, the second is another way of saying enthusiastic, the third is slang for testicles, and the final expression describes an uncontrollable venereal disease—all of which Dorian used in this manner: “Bugger it! That bloke is so mad for it that one day he’s going to wake up to find his nadgers covered in some galloping knob-rot!”)
But the one phrase Dorian uttered that needed no translation was something to the effect that, if Louis didn’t show up soon, the postproduction schedule for Rebecca would be “ballsed up” to the point that the studio might pull the plug on the project.
Would Louis be blamed? No.
I would. Again.
Bollocks!
I was too drunk to remember having stumbled into bed the prior evening. However, I did remember that our taxi had also picked up the rest of Louis’s mates as it had wended its way back to the Lanesborough, and that, even in my much too sloppy state, I’d secured Louis’s solemn oath—not to mention ones from Chaz, Nigel, Andy and Jim—that he’d be in his room, alone, no later than midnight that evening, to ensure that he’d be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in time for his seven o’clock wake-up call the next morning.
Obviously, they’d lied to me.
Louis had lied to me.
Something told me I could take his last Twenty Questions answer with a grain of salt, too.
At 6:59 the next morning, after showering what was left of my hangover out of my Botticellian ringlets, I personally called Louis’s room to wake him up as well. And while I w
asn’t panicking by the thirty-fourth ring, I was by the time my knuckles started bleeding from banging on his door—gently at first, then more frantically as each successive minute ticked by.
By 7:22 A.M., even Ernestine J., swathed in one of Louis’s bedsheets, would have been a welcomed sight.
After securing an extra room key from the front desk and doing a sweep of Louis’s suite to make sure he wasn’t lying facedown in a pool of prostitutes, I hit the phones, calling hospitals, Chaz’s cell phone, and every 24-hour disco the concierge suggested.
Finally, I got Nigel at his flat. “Louis? Dunno. The wanker got brassed off at me and stormed off,” he mumbled. After too many pints of Guinness, Nigel’s BBC elocution had been obliterated. What was left was pure Cockney.
“Why? What happened?”
“Dunno exactly. He disappeared for an hour, then came back into the pub already in his cups and whining about his father leaning on his mum again. Then when I mentioned the play I’m doing in the West End, he said something about wanting to come back to do some theater himself. I laughed and said, ‘No you won’t, not unless you cock up in America.’ That pissed him off! He said he was tired of apologizing to everyone for being a success. Then the bloody sod accused me of calling him a sellout, said I was a bloody poser, and stormed out.”
“I’m sorry, Nigel. I’m sure it was the beer talking and he didn’t mean it.”
“The hell he didn’t! Happens every time he comes home, the insecure bastard. But I guess that’s why you’re there.”
“Why? What do you mean?”
“You know, to catch him when he falls and prop him up again. Blimey, I can certainly see how that would be a full-time job. Well, better you than me. Hope it’s worth the salary he pays you. Bollocks! Sorry, must ring off. I forgot I had a rehearsal today.”
With a click, he was gone.
* * *
When Louis eventually resurfaced—some three hours later—he was hung over, cranky from lack of sleep, and grousing about the absence of any decent coffee in London. I convinced him to take a hot, steaming shower, sent a bellboy over to the nearest Starbucks for a “cuppa” anything remotely resembling his favored Jamaican Blue Mountain (for once, thanking the corporate marketing gods for their strict adherence to conformity), put Alfonse on stand-by for our imminent departure, and called British Cosmo to beg off the interview and photo shoot until the early evening, so that Dorian wouldn’t kill himself—or Louis—when it was time for us to leave for it.
“How unfortunate,” sniffed the editor in a tone similar to the one used in Queen Elizabeth’s infamous annus horribilis lament. “Monsieurs Mert and Marcus had planned on returning home to Ibiza sometime in early evening . . . but I’ll see what I can do.”
“Monsieur Trollope will be forever in your debt,” I muttered.
Louis, toweling off as he gulped down his Starbucks Grande, was within hearing distance and cracked loudly, “The hell I will! They should be chuffed that I even agreed to talk to their feckin’ rag—” before I could hang up.
Too late. She beat me to the punch, but not before letting out a telling harrumph.
“I hope you don’t regret how she writes you up.”
“When I get through charming the knickers off her, she won’t remember why she was mad at me in the first place,” he answered blithely.
But I knew better. For his own good, he needed to move beyond whatever ghosts he was seeing there in the back alleys of London, or else Louis’s London bridges would be burning all around him.
Which meant I’d have to allow him to save face. At someone else’s expense.
And I knew just who that sacrificial lamb would have to be this time around.
“I talked to Nigel—”
“That wanker? What did he have to say?”
“He. . . apologized.”
“Really?” Louis narrowed his eyes into wary slits.
“Yes. He was worried that you might have taken something the wrong way. He didn’t say what it was about; just that he hoped it would blow over.”
Louis nodded grudgingly. “I’ll have to think about it. To be honest, I’m tired of listening to him beg me for help with his career. There is no way he’d make it in America. They’d eat him alive.”
Sighing from exhaustion, he made his way back toward the bedroom to get dressed. As he passed his reflection in the foyer mirror, Louis stopped and scrutinized it. “I really do need to clean house; you know, clear out the bad karma and all that other California New Age bullshit. I do believe in that crap, you know.”
Placing his thumb and middle finger over a frown line on his forehead, he spread it smooth. “Sadly, Mick’s another one who’s been leaning on me too heavily. I guess I should have dropped him a long time ago, too.”
Catching my incredulous stare in the mirror, he added slyly, “But keep mum on that one, okay, love? It’s what I pay you for, right?”
His eyes swept over me slowly, as if appraising my worth, too.
Then he shrugged and walked on.
So much for my role in Louis’s life. Or anyone else’s role, either, for that matter.
* * *
“It’s a wrap!” A relieved Dorian declared, in perfectly understandable English.
“Simply adorable!” the British Cosmopolitan editor gushed, after being charmed out of her Jimmy Choos by Louis, and, thankfully, not her knickers.
“Stunning!” her photo editor murmured upon viewing Mert and Marcus’ Polaroids of Louis, in profile, sans shirt, but with that devilish smile of his intact.
I too smiled, more wanly perhaps, but no less mischievously. For I had found the key to keeping Louis happy:
Just let him do whatever he wanted.
And medicate frequently. Not him; myself.
Personally, I would start that night. Because all of his appointments had miraculously wrapped up ahead of schedule, Louis insisted that we both take the night off, so that we could be rested before the late-morning flight back the next day.
“Sounds good to me,” I answered, yawning widely. “I think I’ll just turn in.”
Not. If I dumped him now, I could make it over to the National Gallery. Luckily for me, this was the one night in which the gallery stayed open until nine, and now more than ever I wanted to see Botticelli’s Venus and Mars. I needed a touchstone to my old life, and art and astronomy are eternally intertwined.
As, apparently, were Venus’s unwieldy ringlets and my own.
Afterwards I’d hit a bar.
“That was my thought, exactly.” Louis smiled innocently. “See you in the morning.”
For Louis, things worked out as planned: he did see me in the morning.
I, on the other hand, caught a glimpse of him a mere hour later, in, of all places, the National Gallery. There, where no cameras were allowed, in an alcove ignored by a public disinterested in Nicolaes Maes’ A Woman Scraping Turnips, Louis, kissed, cuddled, scolded, then passionately kissed again a very sad, very haunted sweet-looking woman about my age:
Samantha.
I knew this because, even sotto voce, his theatrically trained voice couldn’t help but throw out her name while it denied her the love she begged for.
I was mesmerized by their pantomime for almost half an hour. Finally, as he cradled her, bowed and sobbing, in his arms and stroked her hair, I stumbled out from behind the statuette where I’d been hiding, and headed for the front doors.
On my way out, a guard nodded sympathetically, apparently under the impression that I had been moved by all I’d seen.
He was so right: What had aroused me was the care and emotion I now knew Louis was capable of showing someone he had obviously loved at one time.
Or else he was one hell of an actor, which is why I dared not fall in love with him.
So, why was I still attracted to him?
Chapter 9: Perihelion
The point in its orbit when an object is closest to the Sun.
Despite being born and raised
in California, I have personally never bought into much of my homeland’s conventional wisdom.
For example, I do believe that it is possible to grow old gracefully without the need to shoot collagen, silicone, saline, urine, animal placentas, bacteria or other alien organisms into my face, forehead, ass or chest.
And I don’t buy into the theory that death is optional;
Or that a shrink is as much a necessary evil in your life as a cell phone.
And while I’m enough of a visionary to accept the logic behind the how and why of celestial bodies following predetermined orbits, I truly cannot believe that our futures are determined by anything other than the conscious decisions we make.
Then again, if I’d ever reconsidered hiring a shrink, maybe I would have realized that working for Louis was the most irrational, illogical, and deeply disturbed thing I could have done at that point in my life.
Instead I ignored any hints the universe threw at me that staying within Louis’s orbit would be just as bumpy a ride as the one I had taken with Leo, and prayed that Jasper would recover my inheritance soon.
Very, very soon.
“Just hang in there, kiddo,” Jasper counseled. “Something may break any day now.”
If my lawsuit had been a script, you could say that it was stuck in Development Hell.
Until my golden parachute opened, I’d have to keep Louis’s childish, erratic, egotistical demands from driving me crazy.
Right then and there, I realized that the only way to keep my sanity was to convince myself that Louis was nothing more than an employer with the desire to be happy, healthy and successful in his professional endeavors.
With that in mind, my mission was easy: help him achieve these goals.
In other words, become the perfect personal assistant: efficient, creative and indispensable—
And totally immune to any of Louis’s charms.
For three months, no task was too great or small, the latter of which included making sure Louis wouldn’t want for any creature comforts, including the latest and greatest Humvee from the dealership—which he made me exchange twice, just because “the seat doesn’t adjust just right, love. See what they can do about it. That’s my girl”; the multitude of freebees (Las Vegas hotel and resort stays; or couturier, and other luxury items) in return for Louis’s nonchalantly-made endorsements; and a kitchen stocked with his favorite foods (both on and off Zone).