He pushes away, his hands pressing on my shoulders to put distance between us, then he stands, stumbles back, and the back of his hand rises to his mouth as if blotting away the kiss.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“Sorry you kissed me, or sorry you’re being a jerk?”
“Both.”
“What is it? Do I smell? Am I ugly? Do you just not like women?”
“I like women.”
“Just not me.”
“I especially like you.”
“So then, what is it? Is it because I kissed Chris?”
He snort laughs, a chortle through his nose that causes my skin to sizzle.
“I’m glad you find this amusing.”
“If that were the reason, I’d have to give up women altogether. Chris has kissed at least half the women in LA, and the ones he hasn’t are the ones you don’t want to kiss.”
I glare at him, not finding any of this the least bit funny.
He steps toward me and pulls me against his chest, then says, “I’ve given a lot of thought to kissing you, and it has nothing to do with Chris, but I decided it’s not a good idea.”
There’s no meanness in his tone, but the words cut like a knife just the same, and I can barely restrain myself from reaching up and forcing him to kiss me, proving that he’s wrong, that kissing me is a good idea, a very good idea—that I’m a very desirable, very kissable, very good idea indeed. Instead I mumble, “I get it. A mom with three kids, a family that’s not yours, that’s not what you want.”
He rears back. “Where’d you come up with that? That’s not it. Jesus, woman, will you at least let me say my piece? Damn it. Where was I? Damn frustrating.”
“I’m frustrating. That’s hilarious coming from you, Mr. Hot Cold, Hot Cold.”
“At least I recognize that there are consequences to what I do.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means you can’t just act on whatever impulse you feel the moment you feel it and expect it to all work out.”
“So a few moments ago, when you were kissing me, that was carefully planned out?”
“No,” he snaps. “That was a mistake.”
“I’ll say.” I whirl and storm away, tripping in the darkness as I try to see through my tears, not stopping until I’m out of the soundstage, off the lot, and a block away.
Shivering with cold and rage, I pull out my phone to call for a cab, and that’s when I see the five missed calls, three from my mom and two from Sean. And I know before I press play that this awful night is about to get worse.
59
Emily can’t be reached. Sean tried calling her after dinner so he could take her home, but she didn’t pick up. His second message told me that he had dropped Molly off at my mom’s and that I still needed to get Emily before I went home. My mom’s messages consist of “Where are you?” and “Your idiot ex-husband just showed up with Molly but not Emily, so I hope you know that you need to bring her home with you,” and “Where the hell are you?”
I call Emily’s phone. No answer.
I call Beth at home, and she is less than thrilled with having her night disrupted. “What do you want?”
I explain the situation, and her answer is, “Well, what the hell do you want me to do about it?”
“I want you to give me Caleb’s number.”
“It’s not my place to give out cast members’ numbers,” she says and hangs up.
I call Helen. She doesn’t have Caleb’s number. Neither does Jeremy.
I consider calling Griff, but at the thought, my chin starts to tremble.
With no options left, I dial the only number that remains. He picks up on the fourth ring. “Chris, I need your help.”
My knight in shining armor, Chris not only gives me Caleb’s number, but he insists on picking me up so we can find the kids together.
“I’ve got a stake in this too,” he says, as he guns it down Wilshire Boulevard toward the beach where Caleb’s limo driver said he dropped the kids two hours earlier. “Caleb’s got three scenes tomorrow. Lately the kid’s been losing focus. Not that I don’t sympathize. When you’re thirteen, hormones can be very distracting.” Then he looks over at me and sets his hand on my knee. “Hell, at forty-five they’re very distracting.”
I lift his hand from my leg and give it back to him.
“Come on, Faye,” he says. “This would be so much more fun if you and I could be friends again.” His hand goes back to my leg, this time an inch higher than it was the first time, and I feel the tears threatening. I want to move it, but I’m scared, the awfulness of this day that started with me challenging him at the table read fresh in my brain.
“Please, Chris,” I say, my voice cracking with emotion.
He sighs through his nose and takes his hand away.
60
Only Caleb is at the beach when we get there. After Chris called Caleb and told him to stay put because we were coming to get them, Emily said she wasn’t feeling well, so Caleb sent her home in a cab.
Caleb squeezes into the backseat of the Porsche, and Chris pulls back onto the road.
Tension so thick it weights the air fills the small confines of the car as Chris drives to my mom’s condo. Chris is not happy with Caleb. I’m not happy with Caleb. Chris is not happy with me. I’m not happy with Chris. Caleb is simply unhappy. The kid is beloved by millions but doesn’t seem to have a single person in the world who cares about him.
When we’ve been driving ten minutes, I try Emily’s cell phone again. She picks up on the third ring, and using all my self-control to keep my voice level, I say, “How are you feeling?”
“Fine.”
“We’ve been trying to reach you all night. Why didn’t you pick up?”
“Because, like you,” she hisses, “I was busy.”
The phone goes dead.
Three paparazzi lie in wait when Chris pulls to the curb, their cameras clicking away as I step from the Porsche, and I wonder if I’ll end up in the tabloids, Molly Martin’s Mom Dating Show’s Producer, Chris Cantor.
The reporters are becoming familiar to me, a rotation of about twenty different faces that pop up daily either at the condo or outside the studio gates. Tonight there is a pair who look like brothers, both swarthy and dark with grease-stained, collared shirts. Molly calls them Rat and Kale because one is massive and the other scrawny, making them look a little like the characters from Sinbad. The third is a guy who I call Tony on account that he always wears a Bass Pro Shops hat, and Bass Pro Shops is Tony Stewart’s NASCAR sponsor.
I give them a small customary wave and smile, masking my misery until I’m past their prying eyes and safely in the building.
As I ride the elevator, I close my eyes and focus on my breathing. I’m not going to get angry, I tell myself. I need to fix this, somehow make this right. Screaming at her won’t help.
When I walk into the condo, my mom frowns then points to the closed bedroom door. “She got here a few minutes ago.”
I kiss Molly on her head and tousle Tom’s hair as I walk past, giving them a smile I don’t feel. I’m not going to get angry.
Emily looks up from the magazine in front of her as I walk through the door.
“You pierced your nose!” I screech, my vow detonated by my fury.
61
Emily lies propped up on her elbows, a bored look on her face. Twinkling from the middle of it is a tiny diamond stud stuck in her right nostril.
My mom runs in and spins me out of the room. “Faye, you need to calm down.”
“Calm down? My daughter has a spike through her nose.”
“She has a small piercing that will close up in a matter of days if you can convince her that having an earring in her nose is not a good idea,” my mom says calmly as she continues to steer me into the kitchen and sits me at the table.
As soon as my butt hits the seat, I get woozy, and I realize I haven’t eaten since lunch. My mom must sen
se this because she plops an apple in front of me then pops a frozen burrito into the microwave.
By the time the oven beeps, I’ve devoured the apple and my rage has settled into a dark swirling brew. My mom sits beside me as she slides the burrito onto the table. “Eat,” she says.
I shovel the tasteless calories into my grateful body and mutter around it, “What am I going to do?”
“Fix it. You got yourself into this mess, so now you need to get yourself out of it. An earring in a nostril is the least of your problems. Sean’s not going away, and that’s a hell of a lot more dangerous than that thin sliver of silver.”
“And what is it exactly you think I should do about it? He’s their dad.”
“Yeah, brilliant choice that was.”
“Real supportive,” I mumble, dropping my face onto my crossed arms on the table.
“I’m here, aren’t I?”
62
I watch Emily sleeping, her body curled with the comforter wedged between her knees, her copper hair splayed on the pillow.
I’ve always loved her hair, bright like a new penny in the sun, the color of warm syrup when the lights are low. As I watch her, I think of her as a baby, her rolls of peach-colored skin, the way she would look at me with her big green eyes, those dazzling eyes that received so many compliments. Sean’s eyes. I used to love that she inherited his best feature.
Emily has always been the most like him. In looks and personality. Both of them athletic, charming, brazen, and confident to the point of being cocky—heroic or destructive depending on whether they are living in times of war or peace. The kind of fearless that would run into a burning orphanage to save a hundred children, the kind of reckless that would have a bonfire in an abandoned church and set the whole town ablaze.
So unlike Molly, Tom, and myself.
If we were cartoons, Molly, Tom, and I would be the Looney Tunes, and Emily and Sean would be Marvel superheroes.
As I watch her, my mind trips on how to fix things. My mom is right; Sean is dangerous. Until now, I’ve been careful not to disclose too much to Emily about her dad, afraid of revealing the depth of my feelings. I love her with every ounce of my being and, at this point, hate her father equally so. And being that they are so much alike, I was certain this would be confusing. But in protecting her from the truth, somehow I’ve allowed him to become good. A terrible mistake.
I rub her shoulder to wake her, and she groans and covers her eyes, her arm catching on the stud in her nostril and causing her to yelp with the pinch. Sadistically I hope it continues to hurt, perhaps even becomes infected so she has no choice but to remove it.
“Hey, Em,” I say quietly. “Come on, baby, you need to get up. You have school.”
She groans again and pulls the pillow over her head.
Tom, who sleeps beside her, rolls from his side of the bed and stumbles toward the bathroom.
“Come on, two more days then you’re off for a week. Get up, go to school, then tonight we’ll talk.”
She clenches the pillow tighter against her face.
I pull it off and toss it aside so she can’t reach it.
She blinks her eyes open in a hateful squint. “Go away.”
I smile with as much love as I can muster then happily do as she asks, returning to the living room where I am not so despised.
Crawling into the sleeper bed, I cuddle against Molly, and she curls into me. I breathe in her sweet smell and gently stroke her arm to wake her, and I remind myself that this isn’t Emily’s fault. Last night I failed her. That single night was supposed to be hers, and I didn’t show up. This year has been hell for her. Her dad left us, she was uprooted from her home and her friends, and my attention was wrenched away. Emily used to be like Molly. Before everything changed, she too used to let me cuddle with her and soothe her awake.
63
Griff can barely look at me or I at him.
“What’s going on with the two of you?” Helen says between takes.
“Is he married?” I ask.
“Griff?”
“Yes. Is he married?”
“Oh,” she says, looking back and forth between us. “Fishing off the company pier and now your heart is stuck in the cookie jar.”
“You’re mixing your metaphors.”
“Yes, I suppose, but you get what I’m saying.”
“So is he?”
“Is he what?”
“Married?”
“No need to get snippy. No, Griff is not hooked. See, look how I brought that metaphor back around.”
“Impressive,” I say with a defeated exhale. “Fine. He’s not married, and he’s not gay, so then it’s back to me simply being repulsive, even though he kissed me last night like a man discovering Niagara Falls after stumbling through the Sahara.”
“We are a species of narcissists,” she says.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that just because he’s not gay or married, you assume it has something to do with you.”
“It doesn’t?”
She shrugs. “I have no idea. Maybe you’re a lousy kisser.”
“I am not a lousy kisser,” I say too loud, causing several of the crew to look over and smirk.
“Then maybe it has nothing to do with you. Maybe it has to do with him.”
I’m about to press her about it more when Tom interrupts. “Mom, can you run my lines with me again?”
Tom has his biggest scene of the season today, and he’s terribly nervous. Unlike Molly, who is mostly unconcerned about her part, her scenes, or her lines, Tom takes his role very seriously, and today there is a scene that revolves entirely around Grant. But what has his stomach slick with nerves is that the script calls for him to cry, something Tom hasn’t done since he was a baby. Despite being debilitatingly shy, Tom is tough as nails, his emotions buried beneath thick layers of self-consciousness, pride, and self-preservation, concealed so deep that I can’t imagine them ever being unearthed.
“I can’t do it,” Tom says when we finish reading the scene and his eyes are still bone dry. “I don’t know how to cry.”
His blue eyes plead for me to help him, but he and I are too much alike. If you asked me to reveal myself in front of an audience, I would be as incapable as he is.
“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe ask Molly how she does it.”
“I asked her. She says she just does. That when she needs to cry, she just makes herself cry.”
I shake my head, blown away by this bizarre ability and wondering how many times my sympathies have been manipulated by this prodigious, slightly disturbing talent.
“I can’t do that,” Tom says. “I can’t.”
“Can’t is a long way from won’t.” Tom and I both turn to see Jules talking to us. He’s been beside us the whole time, slouched on a stool waiting for the next take to begin, but I hadn’t thought he was listening.
“You think I’m not trying?” Tom says, reverting to Grant’s tough-guy attitude, his stance widening, his head cocked to one side.
Jules’s watery eyes squint as he sizes Tom up. “You’re trying to fake it, I’ll give you that.”
“Of course I’m trying to fake it,” Tom shoots back. “That’s what I’m supposed to do. I’m supposed to act upset.”
“No,” Jules says. “You’re supposed to be upset.” He sighs out through his nose while looking steadily at Tom, as if deciding whether or not it’s worth the effort to continue. Then with a frown and another sigh he says, “What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?”
“Nothing,” Tom says quickly. A blatant lie if he’s answering for either himself or his character.
“Then I can’t help you,” Jules says, standing and walking away.
He’s taken two steps when Tom blurts, “My dad left. I wouldn’t…didn’t…I couldn’t talk in school, so he left.”
My heart splits open, and I step forward to protest his distorted view, but Jules is already there.<
br />
“Okay,” he says, his face a neutral mask that is not sympathetic or callous but emotionless and poker-straight. “So there it is. Now all you need to do is be brave enough to use it, to allow yourself to be upset and let the camera see it. No one needs to know where it comes from; they just need to feel it. If you can do that, you’ll be fine.”
Tom looks unsure.
“Scared?” Jules says. “You should be. It takes incredible courage to open yourself up like that. And each time you do it, you leave a little piece of yourself behind. Hell, I’ve been doing this so long, not much is left. But I’m good; no one can say I’m not good at what I do. A hell of a lot better than you.”
Tom glares at him. “That’s because I’m only eight.”
“No,” Jules answers. “It’s because I don’t act, and neither does your sister. Molly can cry when she wants because she knows how to feel. If something is sad, she gets sad—not her character, her. It makes her good but not great. To be great, you need to go further than that. You need to become the character, surrender that part of yourself.” Jules’s eyes flicker with passion as he speaks, a fervor I’ve never seen in him before. “Each time I’m filmed, I leave a thin layer of myself behind, apparitions of my former self captured in a billion pixels that will live on in perpetuity, hundreds of specters of my spirit inhabiting the earth, though I’m still alive. The Native Americans understood that. They believed photos stole their souls, and they were right.”
As he talks I wonder who Jules might have been had he not become a star. I imagine him as a professor teaching history or political science, a flask in his desk drawer.
“That’s how you do it,” Jules says. “Give them a piece of yourself and they’ll eat it up every time.”
64
What’s going on?” I say to Henry as Molly and I walk into base camp.
No Ordinary Life Page 23