Movie Star By Lizzie Pepper

by Hilary Liftin

  A couple times a week we went to the Studio. Rob had frequent meetings—he was involved in the Studio’s plan to expand the Practice beyond California by building a new studio in the heart of Manhattan—so I’d arrange to have lunch with Meg at the same time. Then Meg started coming over to the house to help me coordinate my life with Rob’s, and pretty soon it became clear that she could manage me better than I could manage myself, so Meg became my assistant, although we never called it that. It was more like she was my very resourceful friend. Who got paid. When she was paid, how much, and by whom weren’t things I had to worry about.

  In late August Rob and I went to the tenth-anniversary rerelease of An Average Man. I remembered seeing that movie in high school, with Aurora, and not quite understanding why all our parents thought it was such a big deal. But now, to watch the movie at its star’s side made me feel like a queen. The line between Rob and the protagonist he played in the film, Joe Ferris, blurred. That was my boyfriend up there, transforming from ordinary Joe to Captain Joe, world leader of the future.

  Being in that theater, I knew how Kathleen Scott felt, encouraging her explorer husband, Sir Robert, to embark on the Antarctic expedition on which he would perish in a blizzard. She wasn’t thinking about the dangers of that frozen world. She was imagining his homecoming, the heroic return, and what their reunion would be like. What made watching An Average Man so hot was knowing that later, at home, Rob would be all mine. I would lie next to the real man behind the hero—the mortal man, who in spite of his bravery still needed me more than anything else.

  Little by little, as in any relationship, Rob and I chipped away at each other’s mysteries. His movie star veneer faded. Aside from when I was actually watching him onscreen and that shiver of unreality came when some facial expression reminded me of Henry in Great and True, our relationship had nothing to do with who he was in the outside world. I watched him fixate on my five-times-magnifying mirror, discovering for the first time his own unruly eyebrows. I found out that his famously distinguished salt-and-pepper hair required three hours with a colorist once a month. I saw him freak out like a schoolgirl when, closing our bedroom curtains, he discovered a bat. I learned that he could only read scripts aloud, and needed to take a break every page or so to check his e-mail, refill his water bottle, and stare out the window. I figured out that whenever he was being asked questions he didn’t want to answer, his manner stayed perfectly even but the muscles in his neck contracted in a tic that made him look momentarily like a hungry fish. And yes, world, Rob Mars’s farts stank.

  But in some ways I felt like I still didn’t truly know my boyfriend. The Rob Mars gloss was layered thick, and I was always poking at him, trying to get him to admit being bored or lazy or in a bad mood. Didn’t he ever feel conflicted or guilty about the eternal sunshine of our days? Did I never annoy him, not even when I picked at my pedicure as we watched movies? And there was one particularly vexing mystery that didn’t diminish: the locked door in the gym.

  Occasionally, when I was working out, Rob came through the gym and disappeared into his private office. He never stayed there long, but I did mention it to Aurora—big mistake. She latched on to it immediately, referring to it as Bluebeard’s chamber. Aurora had all sorts of theories about what went on in there. One day I finally worked up the courage to ask Rob about it.

  “So . . . what goes on in your secret locked room?”

  Rob was running on the treadmill. The door was only feet away. Still, he looked at me blankly.

  “That one,” I said, gesturing toward the door. “Whatcha got in there, Bluebeard?”

  “The dead bodies of ex-girlfriends who asked too many questions, of course. The smell isn’t bothering you, is it?” We laughed, and I waited, expecting him to explain. Finally, he said, “It’s private, Elizabeth. I think it’s important for all of us to be able to maintain personal space. You should try it. The room next to the sunroom would make a beautiful study for you. Or meditation room. Whatever your heart desires.”

  And that was all I could get out of him. It bothered me, I won’t lie, but I also accepted it. If all of Rob Mars’s secrets were small enough to be contained in a single room in this house, so be it. I had a secret or two of my own, and I wasn’t necessarily prepared to come clean, either. And so Bluebeard’s chamber became a joke between us, one of those jokes that was wrapped around a question I half hoped would eventually answer itself.

  8

  My mother wanted to pick us up at the airport. She or my father always met me at O’Hare, wind or snow. I explained to her that this time, instead of coming into O’Hare, Rob and I would be arriving at a private airstrip fifty miles farther from the house, but she insisted on meeting us anyway. I’d already flown with Rob to Cannes, and to a couple of other events. We always landed at small, private airports and hopped from his jet straight into a car without paying attention to where we were until we arrived at our hotel. This time we disembarked to find my mother, wearing her standard capris and polo shirt, waving enthusiastically as if we might not otherwise find her, though she was the only person standing on the tarmac.

  Rob gave my mother a hug and said something about wishing he’d brought her flowers.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “They came yesterday.” Sometimes Rob’s assistant Jake was a little too on top of things.

  I didn’t worry about Rob and my mother getting along. He was certainly in for an easier ride than I had with his parents. His stern mother, Liesl, had worked as his father’s office manager throughout Rob’s childhood in Hudson, but now she was part of the Studio’s administrative team. She was polite and unsmiling whenever I saw her, and I became timid and obsequious in her presence. His handsome father, Alan, whom Rob said I would have loved, had Alzheimer’s and was equally charmed to meet me every time I saw him.

  My mother is a cool customer. Her clique of Highland Park ladies played golf, hosted charity events, and knew their wine. If any of her friends gushed for one minute about Rob (and I’m sure they did), I knew exactly what she’d say: “He’s a lucky man to have my Lizzie.”

  Rob and I were usually driven around in an SUV, sitting together in the back. He looked out of place in the passenger seat of my mom’s little BMW. But he was at his most charming, paying close attention and asking polite questions when she pointed out her friend Sibyl’s shop, the Pattersons’ restaurant, and the club. To my relief his hand didn’t even twitch in the direction of his cell phone—my mom would have been all over that. She was a stickler for manners.

  My mother showed us to our room and left us alone to settle in.

  “Was this your room growing up?” Rob asked, looking at the family photos on the dresser.

  “No, it’s the guest room. My room just has a single bed.” We were lucky, come to think of it, that my mom hadn’t put us in separate rooms, as she had the last and only other time I brought a boyfriend home. But that was five years earlier, and Justin and I had been kids.

  “I want to see your room,” Rob said.

  I giggled, thinking about the pink princess-y canopy over the bed and the clutter of soccer trophies on the bookshelves.

  “I gotta see which poster of me it was. Your high school crush,” he teased.

  Yikes. I was busted. “I’m not sure it’s there anymore,” I said.

  “I’m just kidding,” he said.

  Aurora had to leave town for work the next day, so that very afternoon we met up with her at the Cantina, a Mexican restaurant with a notoriously lax liquor policy where in high school we’d consumed enough frozen margaritas for a lifetime. Just being in one of the booths made me crave an illicit cigarette.

  Rob and I had jokingly categorized the different ways people reacted to his fame. Some fans led by complimenting his work—the Gushers. Others wanted nothing more than a signature on a napkin or a quick photo with him—the Collectors. Then there were those who thought he
was Jesus himself—the Believers. And, finally, there was our favorite group, the people who never acknowledged that they recognized him at all—the Nonchalants. Aurora, by nature, was a Gusher. But she was desperately trying to be a Nonchalant. The result was that she overdid it, making the same conversation she would with any new boyfriend of mine. She asked if we’d met through work and where Rob was from, a polite, stiff smile on her face. I was inwardly mortified. When she went so far as to inquire whether he’d had more luck with movies or television, I mock-smacked her on the head to snap her out of it.

  “Meet my boyfriend, Rob Mars. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. Famous movie star. Great and True. The Son. An Average Man. Need I go on?”

  Aurora put her head down on the table. “I’m an idiot,” she moaned. “It’s nice to meet you, Rob, but in order for me to raise my head from this table you will have to provide me with another margarita.”

  “I have much more to lose here than you do,” Rob said. “I’ll buy you as many margaritas as it takes for you to give your approval to Elizabeth.”

  Aurora peeked out. “Oh my God, Pepper. He’s ridiculous. I can’t function.”

  “I know,” I said. “Over the top.” I squeezed Rob’s knee under the table, grateful for his patience. “Now please sit up and tell him the one about the guy you dated for six months without knowing his name.”

  That night, after my father got home from work, my parents, Rob, and I had dinner together. We sat around the dining room table eating my mom’s pot roast—my favorite—and I looked at the scene through Rob’s eyes: the pockmarked oak table where I’d done all my homework, the neatly repaired wallpaper below the sconces my father had wired himself, my grandmother’s collection of romantic Lladro figurines on the sideboard. Was it all too Middle America for him? But I underestimated Rob. He chowed down on the pot roast, asking for seconds as if he’d studied the script on how to win over my mother. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d called her “Ma.” He was clearly on his best behavior, and I realized he didn’t just see this as an obligatory meeting. He actually cared about making a good impression on my parents.

  For dessert, my mother served frozen Sara Lee cheesecake the way I’ve liked it since I was a kid—frozen.

  I scraped away at the dessert, savoring the icy slivers of cheesy goodness. Rob, given no introduction to what was on the plate in front of him, tapped at it a few times, then carved out a cautious bite.

  “I wouldn’t ordinarily serve this, I’ll have you know, but it’s Lizzie’s favorite.” My mother, she of the (locally) famous homemade pies, was testing Rob. It wasn’t whether he’d turn up his nose at a grocery store dessert. My father, after all, was a royal food snob. It didn’t matter if Rob ate the cheesecake, made fun of it, or choked on it. What my mother was watching for—instinctively, not necessarily consciously—was how he felt about me.

  Rob was staring at me with fascination. “Unbelievable,” he said, shaking his head.

  “What?” my mother asked.

  “It’s just that I’ve spent the entire summer trying to tempt your daughter with various decadent desserts. She turned down the soufflé at Le Meurice in Paris, for God’s sake, and turns out I just needed to call you!”

  That was all it took. Mom was sold. All she wanted for me was a man who was attentive to my every need, and Rob was.

  But I wasn’t deeply concerned about what Rob thought of our middle-American home, and my mother wasn’t the one I was nervous about. It was my father. Doug Pepper, CEO of Pepper Consultants, knew what was best for me. He always had. And it would be very difficult to move forward without his approval. I’d never forget what he did in sixth grade, when, for the first time in my school career, the students were tested and broken into higher-level groups by aptitude. According to your scores, the administration might place you in advanced composition, algebra, and/or world history with the famously rigorous Mr. Hamilton. On the first day of school I brought home my schedule. When my father saw that I was in regular courses across the board, he grabbed the pink sheet away and shook it at me. “You want to live a mediocre life? It starts right here.”

  “But, Dad, it’s fair. They tested us and put us where we belong. The teacher said that people learn in different ways, and . . .”

  “And you know what I have to say to that? Bullshit.”

  The next day, instead of going to school on the bus, I rode in my father’s car. He walked me to my homeroom classroom. As I hung my backpack in my cubby, I heard him instructing my homeroom teacher, Ms. Finley, to make the change.

  All the other kids stopped to listen.

  “She cannot be with those students,” he said forcefully. “She’s a Pepper.”

  “Not really,” I wanted to say, “I’m a Purakayastha.” The story my father always told was that my great-grandfather, upon arriving from West Bengal, was asked to spell his name aloud three times to immigration officers. That night, at the local diner, he pronounced, “Spelling is for schoolchildren. I will not waste any more time on Earth doing this.” At this moment of conviction he happened to be seasoning his favorite American food—scrambled eggs. Hence “Pepper.” It seemed to me that anyone whose great-grandfather offhandedly picked his name from a common tabletop spice was entitled to an average education. Unfortunately, my father did not see it this way.

  Ms. Finley tried her best, but at some point I guess she figured out what I already knew about my father: He went after what he wanted, and he never, ever backed down. I’d heard him say it a million times, during deal negotiations, after poker games, and when he disagreed with a teacher who’d given me anything less than an A. I always win.

  Effective immediately, I was in all advanced courses, and it was a nightmare. I struggled to keep up until my parents hired three separate tutors. Then every night, after soccer practice, I spent another two hours transforming myself into the advanced student my father needed me to be. By the time middle school was over, all the late nights had paid off. I took AP classes as a sophomore, and, through sheer force of Doug Pepper’s will, I was a straight-A student. And then I became an actor and never went to college. Oh well.

  Needless to say, if Dad didn’t like Rob, we were doomed. And Rob already had a few strikes against him. First, he was twenty years older than I, much closer to my father’s age than to mine. Second, my father would never condone a whirlwind romance. He had all but fingerprinted my prom date. And third, their first phone call had consisted of my father yelling at Rob for his cartop performance. Somewhere way back on the Indian side of my family, every marriage had been arranged by the parents. Even though Rob personified the success and fame that most fathers dream of for their daughters, my father was different. He did want to control my life, but in his universe there was only one planet around which everything else revolved, and it wasn’t Mars. It was his creation: me.

  After dinner, my father asked me to come into the kitchen to help fix everyone brandies. Uh-oh, I thought, here it comes. I silently began lining up the glasses, waiting.

  “Well done,” my father said. “Rob cares deeply for you. That much is obvious.” I was happily surprised, but then he went on. “And, of course, there are the professional perks.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “This is an opportunity for you, Elizabeth. Make sure you leverage your newfound visibility to promote your upcoming movie.”

  “Dad!” I wanted him to see me and Rob together, to validate my feelings. I wanted him to be happy for me.

  “No, he’s right.” To my utter embarrassment, Rob was standing in the doorway. I looked from my father to my boyfriend.

  “I’m sorry, Rob. My dad is overly ambitious on my behalf. I would never use our connection to promote myself!”

  Rob laughed. “I know you wouldn’t. And that’s what makes you special. But now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, maybe you should.”

&n
bsp; Dad nodded. “The press is all over you,” he said. “You might as well control the story.” Wow, three hours into their first meeting and the two of them were really in sync.

  Rob added, “Hollywood is shallow. Landing the best parts is all about optics.”

  “Optics, what’s that?”

  “You really are Lucy McAlister from Tennessee,” Rob teased.

  “Enlighten me, please!”

  “Optics just means how things look to the general public. Everything you feel and want is completely distinct from the image you put out in the world.”

  What he was saying reminded me of something Meg had told me—one of the Whole Body Principles was to separate the self from the perception of self.

  “Rob’s cartop performance was a disaster, but people are still rooting for you. They want it to be true love,” Dad said.

  “And luckily, it is.” Rob smiled. My boyfriend had just told my father he loved me, but this was hardly how I’d envisioned it going down.

  “Oh my God, you two are lunatics. My career is just fine, thank you very much.” My mother came into the kitchen and started doing the dishes.

  I put the drinks on a tray and carried them out to the porch. My father and Rob followed, and we all sat down on the cushioned indoor/outdoor wicker furniture.

  Rob squeezed next to me on the love seat. “Babe, you are very talented. You should have your choice of roles.”

  “But I like indie movies with offbeat scripts and quirky heroines. Do I really want to play a spandex superhero? Look at you—you haven’t done a single franchise.”

  “I’ve been very lucky, but my career is the exception. The reality is, once you have a series, you can ride it for years. It doesn’t keep you from doing what you love—it helps make that happen.”

  “I don’t know what I was worried about,” I said. “You two are getting along like a house on fire. What exactly are you proposing?”