I’m not sure why I did it, but I started seeing a married man. He had been a friend for a number of years, one I was always mildly attracted to but didn’t do anything to encourage. His name was Otik, a Czech man who directed commercials and music videos. Barring the gambling addiction, he wanted to be Dostoyevsky. I had read some of the novel he was writing before I became his lover and it impressed me, though it wasn’t likely to be published—there was nothing American about it, no irony or levity in its pages, false or otherwise. I did not see how it could possibly sell. I didn’t tell him this and I turned out to be wrong. When his book, The Monk’s Arsenal, sold, he sent me three dozen roses—red, yellow, and pink. I tore off the tissue paper and felt the heated rush of tears because this was something Antony had done during our first two or three years together. Enormous bouquets with quotes from Keats or Shakespeare scribbled onto the cards would arrive for no reason. I liked to imagine the people in the flower shop, the young girls who took the order from Antony’s assistant, knowing that this Antony was the Antony and wondering if they would ever be loved by a famous man who supposedly could give them everything they desired.
I met him when I was in graduate school at UCLA, where I spent four fevered months in my second year writing a screenplay for him. In a moment of bravado, I sent it to his agent. And then, as if it were an elaborate waking dream, Antony called a dozen weeks later and said that he loved it, he wanted to meet me, he was so flattered and impressed. I was twenty-seven, prematurely cynical about love, but then suddenly, every woman I knew hated me.
We met for lunch on Olvera Street, Antony’s bodyguard, who was also his driver, waiting outside on a chair the restaurant owner smilingly set by the entrance for him. I couldn’t speak for the first several minutes without laughing nervously. My face was flushed, my legs unreliable, my palms so sweaty my napkin became damp. I was terribly lonely and had feebly hoped for someone like him for a long time. It was why I had moved from Minneapolis to California. I had the same dream as millions of other hopeless people: to be discovered and declared worthy by someone far above me in stature.
He was tall, taller than I was by several inches, and smelled like he had just stepped from his bath. His hair was longer than when I had last seen it—in a film that had been released a couple of months earlier, one in which he had appeared naked and raving over a brother’s death—and he touched my arm several times as he told me that he already had a director and a couple of producers interested and they were probably going to film my screenplay if I would allow them to. They would buy it from me, of course, for a fair price. I shook my head, incredulous. “It’s a gift,” I said. “I couldn’t possibly make you pay for it.”
He laughed. “If someone offers you money for your work, you take it. Rule number one. Maybe the only rule in L.A. Do you act too?”
I was smiling so hard that my face hurt. “I wouldn’t dream of it,” I said.
He touched my arm again. People in the restaurant were leering at us. I could feel them trying to decide what was going on, who I was. How in the world had I arrived at this table? Why not them? “Really?” he said. “I thought everyone did.”
I couldn’t tell if he was being facetious, but I didn’t think so. “I’d rather direct,” I said, hoping he’d laugh. More than feeling his hands on me, I wanted to make him laugh. Other women, prettier ones, probably couldn’t do that, not often.
Instead, he winked. “It’s always one or the other. Often both.”
They paid forty-two thousand for my screenplay, more money than I had earned in a year, two years, probably, at that time in my life. The film, Two Things You Should Know, was a success. Later I learned that I could have gotten a lot more if I had tried to sell it through an agent. The film made money, sold overseas to European and Asian distributors, won a few big awards in the United States. Suddenly, I had become someone kind of important. A year or so later I wrote a sequel, Two More Things You Should Know; it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t ever produced. By then, Antony was being sought out by the Italian American directors he had always fantasized about working with.
For a while, we were friends, nothing more, and met from time to time for lunch or dinner; we talked on the phone and went to parties where we knew we would see each other. I was in love with him from the beginning, more or less, but didn’t admit it to myself. I felt an immense, heart-heavy gratitude toward him; he was, it seemed, responsible for my life becoming what I had long hoped it would. He appeared to care about me too, and not just because the film I had written for him was the first one where most of the better-known critics took him seriously.
I told myself that I didn’t want to get involved with him. I could see that he had every woman’s ardent attention wherever he appeared. From what I knew of him, he did not date any one woman for more than a few months. He was as restless as many famous men are believed to be—there are so many options, so many willing participants. If you don’t feel the pressure to make one momentous choice, you don’t; it is easier to make a number of small choices, to keep making them.
But I loved that he liked me, that he kept track of me, sent me gifts, called occasionally. I knew that it was better to be his friend than his short-lived lover. But after Two Things debuted, a year after he finished filming it, he bought me an expensive German car because the film was such a remarkable success.
After Antony delivered the car, he started to court me. I didn’t know it was a courtship, but to most others, especially to James, my depressive boyfriend, it was obvious. “You’re being obtuse,” he said. “Or else you’re just lying. I can’t believe you can’t see what he’s up to.”
“He has so much money that I’m sure it’s not a big deal to buy me a car.”
“No, probably not, but the gesture is the big deal. You don’t buy a car for someone you don’t expect something from in return. How often does he call you now?”
I looked at him, feeling his unease, his desire to give up on me, but he didn’t want to, and I didn’t want him to either, not yet. His lips were very red right then, as if he’d been pressing them together hard. He was an attractive guy, a tall, sturdy man who had played high school basketball well, something he was still proud of. I liked his long limbs and solid frame, his tangled dark hair. I liked, too, that other women noticed him.
“Not that often,” I said, which was a lie. Antony was calling me every few days. Sometimes he wanted me to read a script, which I always did, scorning most of them. But mostly he wanted to talk and flirt. He told me he didn’t know anyone else like me, and of course this was the best compliment I could imagine, aside from “I can’t live without you.”
“He’s just thanking me again for the screenplay,” I said.
“He paid you for it.”
“He’s still just my friend.” I had never told James that I’d written the screenplay specifically for Antony. It would have been a stupid, possibly cruel thing to do.
James rolled his eyes. “If that’s what you want to call it.”
9.
He asked me to marry him when he was sitting next to Tom Petty on the Tonight Show sofa. Petty had just played two songs and talked to Jay for a few minutes, and then Antony came out wearing a beautiful shirt, one made of indigo linen, which I had bought for him during a trip to Chicago a few months earlier. They chatted for several minutes before Jay, with his friendly, squinting smile, asked him about his love life. Antony smiled back and said, “Everything’s going well. But it’ll be even better if Emma, my girlfriend, says yes to my marriage proposal.”
Jay looked at Antony, blinking several times, and said, “Have you asked her? Are you telling me that you asked her and she said she wasn’t sure?”
Antony shook his head. “Actually, I’m asking her now. I hope she’s watching.”
The audience started shrieking and hooting and kept it up until the producers broke for a commercial. I was with my friend Jeanie, another transplant from the Minneapolis area, and hadn’t been w
atching as attentively as I usually did when Antony appeared on TV (it was later, after I saw the show again, that I memorized every detail of Jay and Antony’s exchange), but when I heard my name and realized what was going on, I started shaking so hard that Jeanie had to hold both of my hands for several minutes before getting up to pour us both a large glass of wine and then another. The show had been taped only a few hours before it aired, much less lead time than usual, and no one had leaked Antony’s proposal before then, at least not to me. Very soon my cell phone began to ring without stopping for most of the night. Friends from home, my parents and other relatives, were calling to congratulate me, to weep and exclaim with me. I could not believe that he wanted to marry me, and I suppose I should have paid attention to this disbelief, but who says no when someone you love, famous or not, asks you to marry him?
Soon after his proposal, a few of my friends started to show their jealousy and doubt but tried to pass it off as bracing observation, meant only to make me think.
One friend from home said, You’ll always have money now. What’s the point of you working anymore? Why don’t you go with him when he’s shooting his movies and try to have fun?
A second friend said, What about all his gorgeous ex-girlfriends? Is it really over with all of them? How would you even know for sure?
A third friend said, Is he actually going to go home with you for Christmas and family reunions?
Someone else, my brother’s girlfriend, asked, Will it be an open marriage?
10.
Antony’s favorite joke:
What did the bra say to the hat?
You go on a head, I’ll give these two a lift.
For a while I thought that he didn’t take himself too seriously. After all, he could easily have ignored the script I’d sent to him, never bothered to meet me in person to tell me that he liked it and wanted to buy it. He could have had his agent contact me instead. He could have gotten swept up in the cult of his own fame and completely left everyday life behind.
I suppose it was inevitable that he would meet another woman who interested him more than I did, one who did the same work he did, who understood all of the lurid fan mail and far-away meetings and the sheer exhaustion he felt on some days simply being who he was.
11.
James did not say that he hated me when I admitted to my feelings for Antony. For one, he was a little in awe of him. He might even have hoped that somehow he would benefit from my new fantasy relationship, that I would feel guilty and ask Antony to go out of his way to introduce James to directors or casting agents. He was probably even more talented than Antony was, and for a while, I thought that he would succeed—it might have been on television rather than in film, but his eventual success did not seem at all far-fetched. His depression, his self-sabotaging tendencies, his impatience and manic intensity, however, conspired to keep him from the breakthrough he hoped for.
This is something few people talk about in Hollywood, or anywhere else, despite how obvious it is: most people don’t succeed as actors simply because they can’t handle the near-constant rejection that confronts most beginners. Rejection is the relentless, powerful hazing that disables ninety-seven out of a hundred talented people. No one tells you that for your first two hundred auditions, you would be lucky to land one or two parts, minor ones at that. No one says this because it is stories like Antony’s that have convinced most of us that it should be easy, and if it isn’t, if you’re not immediately chosen and declared the next Harrison Ford or Robert De Niro or Meryl Streep, then you’re just not good enough.
12.
Otik, the married man I started seeing after my divorce, never asked what it was like for me to be with Antony, whether I expected to be as happy again, or as miserable. He did not care to know, nor did he seem concerned that his life was not as glamorous as Antony’s, at least not in the same highly visible way. He was a dozen years older than I, and due in part to the close relatives and friends he had lost to various wars and self-destructive habits, he was unimpressed by the things that impress most of us.
He said a few things at the beginning of our affair that I thought did have to do with Antony, though he was never named.
“Certain events that happen to us,” he said, “we spend a lot of time trying to forget, or else we try to live as if they are about to happen again, even when we know they won’t.”
Immediately I felt defensive. “I don’t live in the past,” I said.
“That’s not what I’m saying, Emma. I don’t mean you in particular. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. My wife is dependent on me for things she believes I provide for her but I don’t. Half of what we see isn’t really there.”
I didn’t believe she was as needy or as deluded as he made her sound. She ran a Montessori school and was raising two children on her own before meeting Otik. She intimidated me with her direct gaze, her air of always knowing the answer before anyone else. “She seems very grounded to me,” I said.
He shook his head. “She doesn’t have a lot of confidence in herself. She thinks that I keep her life from falling apart.”
Along with Dostoyevsky, he idolized Milan Kundera. I think this was part of the problem. Not that I didn’t like Kundera too, but in addition to their celebratory sexiness, his books had a surreal fatalism to them, as did Otik himself, and sometimes when we were together, it seemed as if I were facing a grinning cement wall.
“I don’t feel like that,” I said. “I know what you do and don’t provide for me.”
“I’m not worried about you. Your weaknesses are well policed.”
I stiffened. “Thanks.”
He laughed. “That’s a compliment. Most people can’t wait for the chance to tell you what’s wrong with them.”
13.
As a lover, what was Antony like? Was I too nervous to enjoy it the first time? Or was it so extraordinary to be alone with him, naked in his embrace, that it was the best time of my life?
These are a few of the questions my less discreet friends have asked.
Whether or not they realize it, these are also the questions everyone who reads celebrity magazines asks themselves about the featured couples as they turn the pages. What could it possibly be like for them? Is each time always the best time?
I have heard that a man in New York, a clever guy with social influence and connections, holds parties meant to seem like old-fashioned salons where he and his friends discuss questions such as Do people who can afford it deserve to have more than one or two kids?
Is sushi a big con?
Is sex overrated?
My answer to that last question is a qualified no. The actual physical rewards of sex, because they are so often inconsistent, probably are overrated, but its emotional heft, its implicit statement that another person desires you, possibly more than anyone else, if only in that moment, is, in a way, unrivaled. I loved sleeping with Antony because in those moments, no one else was as close to him as I was.
The first time was at my home, not his, and I wasn’t ready for it, not amply perfumed or dressed in something ridiculous and remarkable. He came over unannounced, and it was raining and February and the previous day had been Valentine’s Day. He’d sent me a card, and flowers, and four pounds of Swiss chocolate. He was in New York that day, doing publicity for his latest project, apparently dateless. When he appeared at my front door, his hair was damp, his face tired but smiling; he asked if he could come in, if he could stay for a while, possibly for good?
This isn’t real, I kept thinking all that night and the next morning. This is a joke, isn’t it?
THE PRETTIEST GIRLS
When I met her, I had the kind of job people always think they want until they try it for a few weeks. I was working for a studio in Hollywood that made a lot of profitable, mediocre movies, and one of my primary responsibilities was to find locations where other movie people would eventually show up with millions of dollars’ worth of equipment, a couple
of irritating stars, and an overworked crew to shoot a feature-length film. It was a job where you had to trust quite a few strangers, where dead ends were time-consuming and predictably infuriating. We were in Mexico, in this dusty little satellite of Guadalajara called Tonalá, where, within an hour after my arrival, I saw a guy in a red vest and black cowboy hat, probably a laborer from a nearby farm, riding on horseback through the streets at rush hour. He sat high on a chestnut horse, clopping through the honking streams of bus and taxi traffic as if he did it every day, which it more or less looked like he did.
The girl was in the marketplace, selling ceramics with her great-aunt, a very wrinkled, fiercely smiling woman. The girl spoke good English and told me that her name was Elsa Margarita, offering me her small, cool hand. I’ve seen a lot of beautiful women, many of them famous, but I couldn’t stop staring at this girl. She reminded me of Sophia Loren in Houseboat, a movie she made with Cary Grant, one where he fell in love with her both on and off camera. His interest was not returned, which left him and many of the film’s fans heartbroken. They wanted life to mirror the movies as badly as they wanted anything. I told Elsa that I was visiting from Hollywood, scouting locations for a film. This line worked nine times out of ten because girls her age always wanted to be famous. She said that she would help me find the church the director needed for a wedding scene near the end of the film, one that was supposed to take place in a dream sequence. He needed a bone-white chapel with a stark steeple and a glaring blue sky behind it and one arching doorway wide enough for a woman with a baby in each arm to walk through. I asked this girl what she wanted in return and she looked at me for a long time before saying, “I want to be in your movie. An extra? Is that what you call it?”
The Virginity of Famous Men Page 4
