by Reiss, CD
“That was brave,” he said. “And foolish. And real.”
“That’s me. Okay?”
“In a nutshell. Yes, that is you.”
I didn’t want him to let me go, but he looked at me so intently, I needed to leave. I pulled away, and he resisted.
“My father played every movie tough guy like he meant it,” Michael said. “He believes that’s who he is. That’s why he won’t get help for the drinking. Because he’s too tough. He missed days and flew into drunken rages on set. His career went into the toilet because he was too big a risk to hire. Bullets Over Sunset is getting made because it’s his last chance and because I could make it happen for him. But he has to stop drinking to do it.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Don’t say that while he lives.”
“I mean I’m sorry you have to go through this,” I whispered.
He lightened his grip with a smile. “When we were on that balcony together, and I’d just heard Britt was going to delay shooting, I knew he wouldn’t make it through. I just… I was on the edge, and I didn’t know what to do. That camera, seeing how confused I was, and you, Laine. You. There were reasons I didn’t say hello before. I cared about you, and I didn’t know what to say to you. When I saw it all fall apart with Britt, I just went over the edge. I apologize for freaking out.”
“I get it,” I said, even though I didn’t get it completely. I only saw his pain, even if I couldn’t wrap my head about the motivation.
He let go and leaned back in his chair. “I’m kind of sorry I told you. You’re not trained to manage the media. You could be a leak in a watertight drum. But I agreed so you’d stay. It was the deal. And you haven’t even eaten your eggs.”
I sat back down. I didn’t know how to feel. I’d never had a parent I cared about. Irving would be the closest thing, but not a single adult in my life had consistently taken responsibility for raising me into a woman. How could I empathize with the need to save that person?
“And yeah,” he said, popping a forkful of scrambled eggs into his mouth, “I’m trying to seduce you.”
“You’ve gotten really lazy then. You should have catered. I mean, no juice even?”
“I can make a joke about my ability to serve after my injury.” He pointed at an elbow as if he did it every time he used the word injury.
“You wouldn’t dare make a pun.”
He smiled that half smile, and the light hit him just right, with a burned yellow tint and a soft halo.
I picked up my camera. “If I ask to take your picture before I do it, am I still a sleazy pap?”
“Are you asking?”
“The light’s really good. I won’t sell them.”
He leaned over and looked at my old rig. The light through the windows was textbook, soft on his cheeks and highlighting the ends of his hair.
“I have your new camera in the car,” he said.
“I want to see how this old horse works.”
“Is there actual film in there?”
“Yes. It’s a terrible pap camera, but for a perfect guy sitting still in perfect light, it’s perfect.”
“By all means then.”
I was reluctant to crouch in front of him and put the camera in front of my face, but once I did, he went into actor mode. I’d never seen someone come through the lens like that. Some people had that thing, that aura, that frame-crowding presence, but until I got him in a shot he wanted to be in, instead of running away, I hadn’t understood it.
“You always take so few?” he asked, fingers in his hair, head tilted like a sexy movie star god.
“I take fewer than most. Turn a little toward the window.”
“Are you wondering how I found you?” he asked between shots.
“I figure you’re rich, so you have rich person superpowers.” I meant it. The wealthy could always just get things done in a way the rest of us couldn’t. It was an assumption, and a foolish one. It gave him abilities he couldn’t possibly have. It set him up to fail me.
“Your name is on your mortgage, and your mortgage is a matter of public record.”
I didn’t lower the camera, but I stopped taking pictures. Michael leaned down toward me, filling the frame.
“Everything Ken found out is on the public record, and he knew stuff the Post didn’t publish. Stuff he held back.”
I clicked the shutter because my hand got so tight. But the camera? That stayed in front of my face. I couldn’t look at him. I felt too vulnerable for that.
“I came here to seduce you with breakfast and to apologize for my publicist and also to tell you that you need to protect yourself.”
I remembered the two paps who had followed me downtown. I hadn’t even wondered how they’d found me. I assumed it was a tip or something, but what if they’d followed me from my front door?
The frame got dark as he put his hand over the lens and pulled the camera away.
“There’s information out there, and it’s not a big deal for most people,” he said. “But you’re out there now. Until they forget and move on to the next thing.”
“I don’t want to be famous.”
“I understand.”
“I just take pictures.”
“I know.” He put the camera on the table.
“And I kissed you. That was—”
He put his finger on my lips. “I’m going to protect you. I’m going to teach you how to do this.”
I stood. “No. I don’t need to be protected. Who’s coming after me? A bunch of smelly paparazzi? Sitting out front in their shitty SUVs waiting for life to come into frame? No. Screw them.”
“What about your family? They say screw you too?”
I stiffened. I didn’t talk about that to anyone, but I’d told him so much in the bleachers. I’d told him I’d worked in Mister Yi’s sweater factory because my hands were small enough for the machines and that he sent me away when the order was done. I’d told him about Sunshine and Rover, who I’d loved and who loved me. I’d told him about the perfectly put-together mom I’d called June Snowcone, her super particular OCD, and how I’d never done anything right for her. I told him about the mom and dad who’d ignored Tom and me, the nights and days we’d spent wandering the city instead of going home. I never expected him to remember it all.
“I told you all about my family.”
“Your mother is dead. She died in prison when you were eleven.”
“Do you remember that? Or is it from Ken?” I asked.
“Both.”
I bit my lower lip, and he reached down to free it from my top teeth. I sat down, toying with my camera on the table.
“This is awkward,” I said. “I want to get mad about my privacy, but being who I am and what I do for a living… I can’t really, can I?”
“You can if you want. It’s just not a good use of your energy.”
“I wasn’t prepared for this.”
“We’ll figure it out. Is there anyone else you need to warn? What about your father?”
“You don’t remember?” I spun the camera on the table. “He left my mother when she was pregnant. I’ve never met him. She never told me who he was, not even when she went to jail and I went into the system. He doesn’t even know I exist. Why are you talking about this shit? No one’s family is safer than mine.”
His elbows rested on his knees, and he looked at me with big green eyes. “I thought you knew.”
Between my intellectual disorientation (What? Who?) and my emotional confusion (Why?) I froze in place. If I’d ever thought of my father as a real person, which I realized had never occurred, I might have been angry at him. But how could I be angry at a man who had never existed? Dead, alive, gone, here, none of it mattered.
Was Michael trying to resurrect the dead? Was he making a man out of a pile of dust or the extra bone of a rib cage?
And his silence. The way he closed his mouth and didn’t let his eyes waver from mine. I felt observed, peeled open, and exam
ined in a way that would have been uncomfortable if it hadn’t been him. I couldn’t explain to myself why it was all right coming from him, why his silent, deadly scrutiny didn’t feel invasive but welcome.
“I’ve seen my birth certificate,” I said. “Brian Cartwright is nobody. I looked for him. He’s gone like the freaking wind. And the wind can have him,” I said. “I don’t give a shit.”
“Really?”
Where did he get that confidence? That ability to say one word that would throw me off my axis and catch me at the same time?
“Really.” I grabbed my camera. “Thank you for the eggs. Your apology is accepted, and your warning… I get it. Thank you. I’ll keep my eyes out.”
Fifteen steps to the door. Why were those lofts so damn big? What was I thinking?
Five steps, and I heard a shuffle behind me, the scrape of a chair. I picked up the pace, and I knew he was behind me. By the time I got to the door, his chest was against my back and his hand was over the doorjamb.
“Don’t,” he said.
“Don’t what?”
“I’m going to get between you and this. I don’t like anyone knowing where you are. I don’t like you walking around at night unprotected. Especially because of me.”
I turned, putting my back to the door. “I haven’t seen you in ten years. Now this?”
“I should say it’s that I feel responsible for what’s happening. But you’re in this business as much as I am, so it’s not that. It’s you. I was up half the night thinking about you in those bleachers. The things you told me. The stuff I told you. How I felt. Back then, I was so confused, and I left you without a call or checking on you for reasons that…” He shook his head. “The reasons were pathetic. No one would have approved of you, and I lived on approval.”
He touched my hair, and those long strands became nerve endings for desire. The little hairless spot on his chin shifted, and I wanted to touch it so badly that I did so without thinking.
“Whatever it was I felt before, I’m not hiding from it this time. This time, I’m not going to worry what anyone else thinks,” he said.
“What if I’m worried?”
“I’ll make you not worried.”
His breath warmed my cheek, and I believed he could change things, even as I knew he couldn’t. He could only drag himself down. This could only go bad. But I turned my face until my lips touched his, and he stopped being a movie star. He was the boy in the bleachers, the one who worked too hard and cared too much, and I became the girl who could be anything she wanted, the one who was accepted and whose life was about to turn around.
But I’d wanted it then. I’d wanted his hand in mine to be the warning bell for change. In the penthouse loft, with his lips and tongue growing more urgent and his hands on the sides of my face, I didn’t want my life to change. I’d done everything I’d set out to do since he’d left, and there he was again, ready to destroy everything I’d built in exchange for a mouth that fit mine like a palm curled over a fist.
I turned to face the door, still trapped by his arms, and opened it a crack. He slapped it shut.
“If you’re not busy, I want to take you somewhere.”
“I’m always busy,” I said, leaning into him.
“Doing what?”
“Taking pictures of Hollywood royalty.”
“Bring your camera then.”
I held my finger up to him and said in pure mockery, “That kind of thing isn’t going to fly, superstar.”
He stepped back and took his jacket off the counter. “Today it is. Come on. It’s fun. You’ve never seen this part of the city before.”
“Ha! Fat chance of that.”
“You’ll only know if you come.”
The possibility of showing him a thing or two about the city he pretended to rule was too good to pass up. “You’re driving.”
He opened the door. We went out and strode to the stairs.
“Are we going to get mobbed? Because I’m not up for another LA Post story,” I said.
“We have ways around you guys when we need them. Today, I needed it.”
“What ways?”
He opened the door to the parking lot. “We’re not ready for that, Shuttergirl.”
I hadn’t expected him to tell me the strategies he used to avoid people like me. Or maybe I did. Maybe I’d forgotten who I was for a split second and became no more or less than a girl with a boy, because I was disappointed at the same time as I knew I had no right to be.
He approached a green two-seater Aston Martin and opened the passenger side door.
“This isn’t exactly inconspicuous,” I said as I buckled in, “but it’s super cute.”
“One tends to cancel out the other.” He leaned in, one forearm on the roof of the car and one on the open door. “You have the very same drawback.” He kissed me quickly and closed the door before I had a second to absorb the compliment.
I was smiling like a schoolgirl when he slid in next to me. God, would that be us? Would I do nothing but grin like an idiot around him? I shook it off. That wasn’t me. I wasn’t impressed so easily.
“If you’re taking the 101 anywhere north,” I said, “you should get on after the Cahuenga Pass. Time of day, and all.”
The engine rumbled to life, and he pulled out, looking bemused. “I should blindfold you, or you’re going to just boss me the entire way.”
“Good luck with that.”
He took my hand at the first red light, drawing his fingertips from my wrists to the webs of my fingers and bending them closed. After everything I’d done in my life with men, after what Jake and his friends had exposed me to—the humiliations, the distasteful acts, all the things I tried to not think about—I couldn’t believe that having my hand held could make me feel like four pounds of joy in a two-pound bag.
“Do you want the top down?” he asked, squeezing my hand a little as he headed up Western Ave.
“Will people see you?”
“Yeah, but it’s fun. The top, I mean. Not getting seen.”
“Next time then.”
Damn. I’d said next time, which presumed that there would be a next time. After the LA Post story, which was undoubtedly the tip of the iceberg, the last thing we had were guarantees.
“Nighttime’s easier,” he said. “And anything one lane is good, so no one can get astride, and any cars going the other way can’t turn around because it’s too narrow. They’d have to pull a K on Sunset by Palisades, and the twisty part of Mulholland.”
“Are you telling me your secrets? Because I could be taking notes right now.”
“That won’t make the road any wider.”
“I could just wait until the sun goes down and stand at the side of Mulholland with a motorcycle. All I have to do is wait until I see a good-looking guy in a convertible, then he’s mine.”
He glanced at me sidelong. “Just call me next time. It’s safer.”
“But not half as much fun.”
Why was I digging this hole? Why was I making this an issue? I was the hunter, and he was the prey. I made money from his work whether he liked it or not, and that was what it was. Maybe I kept bringing it up because it was real. The nagging pragmatist in me wouldn’t let the fantasy of our connection exist undisturbed.
But there were our hands, clasped in a double fist, and the longing in my body surged again. I crossed my legs. I was wet. I knew it. Just from this nothing we were doing.
I wanted to say something. I was going to say something, but I couldn’t find a way to open a conversation without apologizing for how I made my money, and that was the most insincere thing I could do.
At the light at Franklin and Beechwood, just before the psychological barrier of the Hollywood Hills, a horn honked.
“Look at me,” he said.
I did. He looked over my shoulder and grinned, making a peace sign out the passenger side window. Through the other car’s window, someone squealed.
I didn’t blame them
.
“You should get a driver,” I said.
He leaned back in his seat. He was turned toward me, close enough for me to smell the cinnamon on him. “Driving my own car is an entitlement. Sorry. I’d rather deal with red lights.”
He took off, twisting into the park and around the corner, checking his rearview mirror as we went into the deep recesses of the hills. The houses were set back behind foliage, big, well-kept, and selling in the multi-millions. There wasn’t a sound up there but the rumble of the Aston’s engine and the birds. I was sure he could have put the top down safely.
“I’ve been up here, you know,” I said. “You hardly have to blindfold me.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. If you make a right up here and go down a little ways, you’ll catch the back entry to the Griffith Park Boys Camp.”
“Uh-huh.” He kept driving up Deronda, a little curve playing on his lips.
I started realizing that maybe I hadn’t been that far up before, because there was nothing there. At the end of the road were two identical gates. One had signs all over it warning against hiking and threatening arrest. The other warned against trespassing.
Michael flipped his visor down and clicked a little beige box that looked like a garage door opener. The trespassing gate creaked open. He looked at me, one eyebrow raised.
“You win,” I said. “I have never been past this gate.”
“Don’t feel too bad about it.” He pulled past the gate onto a hidden street of mansions. “I had to do my share of begging to get access today.”
The twists and turns of the road were etched into the shape of the mountain, making it impossible for me to keep track of what street we were on. Not that it mattered. I’d never get up there again. “Who the hell even lives up here?”
He put his finger to his lips, taking my hand with his as if he was afraid to let it go, and whispered, “Shh. Lawyers.”
I laughed.
The houses fell away, and we drove headlong into the nothing of nature with its fullness of sound. He put the top down, and I looked up, holding my tennis player’s hand while watching the canopy of trees, a moving border on the clear blue sky. Still holding my hand, Michael punched the radio. I expected the same techno he’d played in the loft above mine, but something else came out.