I was sipping a Bahama Mama cocktail, engrossed in my own conversation with a Montana Girl named Shirley, when I spotted Chuck Fuse out of the corner of my eye. He had taken a seat at a table next to the shallow end of the pool, joining a half dozen other partiers who were digging into baked crab and grilled rock lobster. I recognized the person to his left. It was hard not to. John Goodman was playing the supervillain in the film. But I couldn’t quite make out the face of the woman to Fuse’s right. There were too many people blocking my line of sight. Even so, I could tell she was a knockout. I definitely needed a better look. Only half paying attention to what Shirley was saying, I jockeyed around for a better angle. Jesus, she was gorgeous. The last time I’d seen cheekbones like those was when I met Eliska in Prague. And then my jaw dropped.
It was Eliska.
What the hell was she doing in the Bahamas? I couldn’t figure it out. But then it all became hideously clear. My heart sank as Fuse wrapped his beefed-up arms around Eliska, gave her an affectionate squeeze, and planted a big kiss on her cheek. Obviously, she was his girlfriend. They must have hooked up on Boom! and been dating ever since. Somehow their romance had slipped under the tabloids’ radar—Fuse was pretty good at keeping his private life private—but there was no mistaking what was going on between them at this party. Gossip columnists call it “canoodling.”
What the fuck? Why were movie stars always stealing my girlfriends? Okay, so my relationship with Eliska consisted of one kiss and a botched long-distance phone call, but theoretically she could have been my girlfriend, in a different reality. She’d been the first woman I’d met since Sammy who actually got under my skin, in a good way. I knew, of course, that one of the things contributing to my attraction was the fact that she lived seven time zones away, on the other side of the planet: I always wanted what I couldn’t have. Still, there was something different about this girl. For some reason, just thinking about her made me smile. But once again a movie god had swooped down from Mount Famous and snatched a woman away from me. I ducked out of the party before Eliska saw me.
As I lay in my feather bed in the Big House listening to a tropical symphony of insect-chirping in the garden below my windows, I asked myself why I was always falling for unattainable women. Was it intentional? Was I deliberately choosing impossible mates as a way to protect myself from intimacy and relationships? Well, duh, of course I was. But that didn’t mean my feelings for Eliska weren’t true. She was the first girl in ages to make my heart pound outside my chest like Pepé Le Pew’s. That was real. That was genuine. I wasn’t making that up. It wasn’t my fault she was unattainable.
The first shot of the day was, naturally, an action sequence. Jack Montana jumps on a motorcycle and races through the streets of Nassau while being chased by a bad guy in a Lamborghini tricked out with machine guns and missile launchers. At the end of the scene, after Montana outmaneuvers the Lamborghini—it smashes into a banana truck and blows up—Montana’s motorcycle screeches to a stop in front of the smoldering wreckage. He turns to an astonished innocent bystander and Fuse delivers his only dialogue of the day: “Relax, it was a rental.”
The studio had insisted that 7even put the one-liners back into the script, but otherwise the director was actually coming close to fulfilling his promise of making a silent Montana picture. Aside from this and a few other chestnuts, Fuse barely had a speaking part—mostly he just grunted and growled. The ex–X Gamer wouldn’t be doing much of his own action, either; the studio had been quite firm about that. Stunt doubles would take all the risks. All Chuck had to do was show up in costume at the end of a scene, switch places with the stuntman, and deliver a killer quip for the close-up. For this he was being paid $7 million.
I turned up at the set—an abandoned concrete factory in Coral Harbour—at nine in the morning and watched as a special effects crew rigged the banana truck with detonators. Fuse and 7even were in their air-conditioned trailers while the rest of the crew were keeping cool in other ways—fanning themselves with script pages under palm trees, lying down on benches in the catering tent—waiting for the explosion to be ready. I didn’t think Eliska would be there. As the star’s girlfriend, she’d more likely be lounging on one of Surfside’s private beaches or shopping at one of its overpriced boutiques. But there she was, sitting in the shade under a palm tree, reading a book.
I hesitated. Was it still proper for me approach her? Now that she was a star’s special friend and not a crew member, would I be crossing a social barrier? Did I need to ask the unit publicist’s permission? Screw it, I decided, and walked over to say hello. As I got closer, I zoomed in on the thick book she was reading. It took a second to decipher the Czech, but it was Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. I wracked my brain for a Foucault reference but my knowledge of twentieth-century French post-structuralism was a bit rusty.
“They were all out of Hannah Arendt at the bookstore?” was the best I could come up with.
“It’s you!” Eliska said, jumping up. “I heard a writer from KNOW was coming to interview Chuck. I was wondering if it would be you.”
“You know, I happen to be an expert on Foucault’s theories on sexuality …”
“Oh, I bet you are,” she said, laughing. Her spy girl accent was even hotter than I remembered. “It’s for school,” she said, showing me the scribbled notes in the book’s margins. “You know, I owe you an apology.”
“You do?”
“Yes, I upstood you at the Charles Bridge. Upstood, no? Is that not correct? I got called in early for work that morning and had no way to reach you. I didn’t have your number. I felt very bad about it.”
“It’s ‘stood up’ and it’s perfectly okay,” I said. “I totally understand.”
“Didn’t I give you my number in Prague?” she asked. “I remember writing it down.”
“No, I don’t think so,” I said, in case she suspected me for that five a.m. hang up. “But you and Chuck—what a surprise! It seems like things are really working out for you two. I’m glad for you, I really am.”
“Oh yes,” she said, “Chuck is a great opportunity. He’s been so generous to me. After this movie, I’ll have enough money to pay all my graduate school bills. I owe him so much.”
“Wait a second, he pays you?” I asked, trying to hide my shock. I knew movie stars sometimes kept mistresses on the payroll, but I couldn’t believe how blasé Eliska was being about it. She didn’t seem the slightest bit embarrassed or ashamed that she was being paid to be Fuse’s girlfriend. I’d heard Europeans were more sophisticated about this sort of thing, but this was ridiculous.
“Of course he pays me!” Eliska said. “I’m sure some girls would do it just for the traveling—I mean, I never thought I’d get to the Bahamas in my life!—but I’m not doing this for fun. I need the money for school.”
“Well,” I said, scratching my head, “I’m sure you’re really great at it.”
“Well, it’s not hard to make Chuck happy,” Eliska said. “Once you learn how he likes things, he’s very easy man to please.”
Before I could think of a response to that, the assistant director announced over a megaphone that they were ready to shoot the scene. At one end of the set, a brand-new Lamborghini Gallardo purred in neutral while its stunt driver waited for a signal. It was a $175,000 high-performance vehicle; in a few minutes, it’d be fricassee. At the other end of the set, techies made final checks on the banana truck. Finally, after about twenty minutes of suspense, 7even emerged from his trailer to execute his creative vision. He was wearing a white linen suit exactly like mine, only his didn’t have a single wrinkle. Maybe if you have enough money there’s no such thing as wrinkles. He was also wearing a fedora and had a monocle on a chain around his neck.
7even looked at the Lamborghini, then looked at the truck, then back at the Lamborghini. “It’s yellow,” he said, correctly identifying the color of the race car he was about to destroy. “It’s fucking yellow! Who’s the fucking moron w
ho decided to put a fucking yellow Lamborghini in my film? It’s right there in the fucking script—it’s supposed to be a red Lamborghini! Can’t you fucking idiots read!” He stormed back into his trailer and slammed the door.
For a moment, the entire crew stood frozen in silence. You could see it in their faces—the sudden realization that the next three months of their lives were going to suck. The assistant director got back on the megaphone and postponed the sequence. Then he got on his cell phone and called the second-unit film crews that were shooting other parts of the car chase on other parts of the island with matching yellow Lamborghinis. To save time, that’s how chase sequences were made—later on, all the footage from the different units would be edited together into a single seamless scene. Only now all the crews would have to stop and wait until a new fleet of red Lamborghinis could be found to replace the yellow ones. It could set the production back a week—and this was just the first day of filming.
I looked around for Eliska, but there was no sign of her. I couldn’t figure it out. I didn’t know her well, obviously, but from what I did know she seemed like the last woman on the planet who’d be interested in Chuck Fuse, or even in Chuck Fuse’s money. The girl I kissed in Prague, she didn’t care about fame. The only celebrities she was interested in had names like Spinoza and Heidegger. She was sincere. She was authentic. She was a philosophy major! How could she be with a Hollywood numbskull like Fuse? It didn’t make any sense.
My interview with Fuse was the next day. It did not go well, although he couldn’t have been more charming, in his big, dumb, stoner way. He even remembered me—or pretended to—from our interview in Prague. “Dude! How ya been!” he said, greeting me at the door of his $20,000-a-night beach chalet. The place truly was spectacular, maybe even worth the price tag. I noticed a remote on the sleek glass coffee table with only one button on it. Fuse pushed it and we watched together as the living room ceiling rolled open to the sky. “Pretty freakin’ cool, right?” Fuse said, handing the control to me to play with.
I kept looking for clues as to what Eliska saw in him. He did have a sort of Neanderthal charisma, I had to give him that. And I was happy to see that he had learned a touch of humility since our encounter in Prague, when he told me he was born to be a movie star. “These are very big shoes you’re stepping into,” I started the interview. “Johnny Mars turned the character into a cultural institution. It’s hard to imagine a Jack Montana movie without him. Maybe the character should have been retired, at least for a while, out of respect for Mars …”
“Dude, I agree, there’s no way I’m going to fill Johnny’s shoes,” Fuse said. “My Jack Montana is never going to be as good as Johnny’s. He invented the character. Nobody will ever do it as well as he did. All I can do is the best I can do. And hope that I don’t look like a jackass on the screen.”
“How are you getting along with your director?” I continued to probe. “He seems a tad temperamental …”
“Gary? He’s a pussycat,” Fuse parried. “He just wants what he wants, and I respect that. I mean, dude, the guy is brilliant, right? Have you watched Bad Rabbit? Scariest freakin’ film I’ve ever seen. That’s the work of an evil genius.”
Eventually, I decided to dive right into it and ask him about Eliska, albeit slightly indirectly. “I hear you had a little romance in Prague while shooting Boom! I know you don’t like to talk about your private life, but …”
“What are you talking about?” Fuse interrupted. He looked surprised, and concerned. His pompadour bristled like fur on a frightened cat. “Who told you that? What have you heard?”
I wanted to keep prying, but I didn’t want to get Eliska in trouble, so I moved on. But Fuse spent the rest of the interview eyeing me suspiciously. I didn’t get much from him after that. I turned off the voice recorder after only about thirty minutes. Carla was going to be pissed. I really would have to bring her back a snow globe this time.
As I was walking along the beach path toward my room in Surfside’s low-rent district, thinking about how uptight Fuse had become when I mentioned his personal life, I ran smack into Eliska. She was heading toward Fuse’s chalet carrying a big bundle of garment bags—his wardrobe from the costume department. “How’d your interview go?” she asked brightly.
“Oh, I don’t think your boyfriend likes me very much,” I told her. “And I can’t believe he makes you lug his laundry around for him. Here, let me help with that …”
Eliska pulled back and shot me a look. “My boyfriend? What are you talking about?”
“He’s not your boyfriend?”
“No,” she said. “Of course not.”
“But I saw him hugging you at the pool party. I saw him kiss you …”
She laughed so hard she dropped some of the bags. “I’m his assistant!” she said. “I work for him. He hired me after Boom! wrapped. You thought I was his girlfriend? I’m not his type at all.” She laughed some more as I helped her pick up the bags. “Chuck is not into girls.”
“He’s gay?” I asked, stunned. I really needed to get my gaydar checked.
“Wait—I didn’t say that,” Eliska said, suddenly remembering I was a reporter. “You can’t write that. Please! It would not be right of you to write that. This is why they tell us not to talk to journalists!” She grabbed the garment bags from me, clutching them close to her chest. “Ugh,” she said. “I have a mouth like the Grand Canyon.”
“No, Eliska, relax, I’m not going to write about it,” I assured her. “I don’t care if he’s gay or not. I don’t write those sorts of stories, honestly I don’t.”
“You promise?” Eliska asked, calming down.
“Cross my heart,” I said.
I was telling the truth. I normally didn’t write about the sexual orientations of the people I interviewed—frankly, there are enough closeted action stars in Hollywood to mount a production of The Pajama Game. But I was relieved to have gotten to the bottom of the mystery. And I actually liked Fuse a lot more now that I knew he played for the other team. Suddenly all that X Games bravado and surfer-boy slang—all those “dudes” and “freakins” he slipped into every sentence—seemed sweetly endearing. The guy was obviously a much better actor than I’d been giving him credit for. Maybe he was perfect for the part, after all. Best of all, though, it meant he wasn’t canoodling with Eliska.
“Do you bring a bathing suit?” Eliska asked me.
“Pardon?”
“A bathing suit—do you have one?”
“Sure, why?” I asked.
“Put it on and meet me here in an hour. I want to show you something. Something that will amaze you. It will make up for when I upstood you in Prague.”
I changed into swimming trunks and a T-shirt, brushed my teeth, combed my hair, slapped on some aftershave, looked at myself in the bathroom mirror, and tried on a different T-shirt. I couldn’t believe it. I was actually nervous before going on a date. I barely recognized myself.
Eliska was waiting for me on the beach. She was wearing a red one-piece swimsuit, a straw sunhat, and a pair of unlaced black Keds. On her, the outfit made my pulse do the cha-cha. “Come on,” she said, leading me along the shore. “You aren’t going to believe what I’m going to show you. I found it the other day. It’s amazing.” Wherever Eliska was taking me, it wasn’t nearby. We hiked along the shore for about twenty minutes, chatting and getting reacquainted. Eventually, I got around to asking her the obvious question.
“How come you don’t have a boyfriend?”
Eliska sighed. “There was a boyfriend,” she answered as we walked in the sand. “He was English. His name was Jeffrey …”
She met Jeffrey in Prague at an art show at the old Stalin Monument in 2001, when she was twenty-three, and was immediately infatuated. He was British. He was handsome. He was an aristo. He opened doors and showed Eliska a world she hadn’t even imagined existed. “I felt so backward compared to him,” Eliska said. “He came from this wealthy English family and I was just
this girl from nowhere.” Jeffrey took the girl from nowhere for trips to France and Spain and Italy and introduced her to a stream of exciting new friends who discussed film and music and art. “I fell for him completely,” Eliska said. “I was sure he was the man of my dreams.” But after a year of romantic globe-trotting, Jeffrey’s father back in Mayfair began tapping on his watch and telling him to come home. Youthful infatuation was one thing, but he wanted his son to marry a proper English girl, not some Slav from a former Soviet puppet state. He threatened to pull the purse strings shut if Jeffrey didn’t leave Prague, and without the Slav. Jeffrey obeyed. Eliska never heard from him again.
I was so wrapped up in her sad tale that I stopped wondering where Eliska was taking me. I had found a kindred spirit. True, the details of our sob stories were different—her heart was broken because of a snobby dad out of a Merchant Ivory movie; mine because a movie star seduced my girlfriend—but we had been on the same emotional journey. We had both lost loves to worlds where we didn’t belong, where we could never be more than sightseers. I wanted to tell her I knew how she felt, share my own sorrows with her. But we came to a small rocky cliff that jutted into the water, blocking the shoreline, and Eliska started climbing. “It’s just over these boulders,” she promised, offering her hand to help me climb.
Leading Man Page 14