by Shari Low
‘Uncle Sam, Uncle Sam!’ he screamed, delighted.
I reached two things at exactly the same time. Sam and the end of my tether. As he reached over to envelop me in a hug, I burst into tears. And not pretty Demi Moore/Ghost-type tears. Not even mildly sweet Kate Hudson tears. I’m talking full-scale Gwyneth Paltrow, nasal fluids, racking sobs, off-the-scale-in-humiliation-and-embarrassment tears. Sam looked horrified, but that might have been because my make-up-smeared, tear-drowning face was in contact with his two-thousand-dollar jacket.
‘Hey, hey, what is it? What’s wrong, honey?’
‘Uncle Sam, Uncle Sam, we’re going to see Spiderman!’ screamed Mac. ‘Spiderman, Spiderman, does whatever a Spider can…’ wailed Benny.
There wasn’t a single person in the building who wasn’t looking at us. I pulled my head off his clothing.
‘Sorry Sam, it’s…it’s…been emotional,’ I said apologetically.
‘Don’t worry, it’s okay. And there’s me thinking you were just overcome with joy at seeing me.’
I suddenly realised he was looking behind me expectantly.
‘So where’s Mark? Did he get held up in customs?’
‘He’s not coming.’
‘What? Why?’
At which point I gave him a sane, rational update on the situation. Unfortunately, however, it came out as ‘yyyeeeurrrghhh’ and was accompanied by a fresh round of hysteria. I gasped for breath and eventually regained the power of speech.
‘I’m sorry, Sam. Sob. I’ll be fine in a minute. Sob. Then we can just get out of here and we’ll forget this ever happened, okay?’
‘Okay, honey, no problem.’
But actually it was a problem. At first I thought a bulb on one of the overhead lights had popped. Then another. And another. LAX definitely needed to revisit their maintenance policies. Then another. Then…‘Hey, Sam, who’s the lady?’ ‘Sam, over here.’ ‘Sam, this way.’ ‘Who is she, Sam?’
Suddenly we were surrounded, the flashlights were going off everywhere and we were marooned in a sea of paparazzi. Sam grabbed Mac and I frantically grabbed Benny. Sam shouted to someone to get our bags, and then put his child-free arm around me. ‘Just put your head down and walk fast,’ he shouted. Security guards materialised and suddenly I got an inkling of how Moses felt. The sea of denim and Pentax parted, and after only a few minor tussles we burst out of the doors and into a waiting limo.
‘Okay guys?’ I asked the kids breathlessly. They both nodded. And I made the very mature, responsible, parental decision to ignore the fact that Mac was making a particularly rude gesture to a photographer who’d knocked off his baseball cap.
I looked up at Sam with my scrunched-up face and swollen eyes.
He grinned. ‘What d’ya think of the LA welcoming committee? We put that on for all the new arrivals.’
‘Impressive. You might want to do something about that whole trolley/fecking great big hill combination though.’
He laughed. And despite being about as stable as Mariah Carey on a rope bridge, I found myself joining in, and…oh no. It must be jetlag. Stress. Insanity. I was in a stretch limo for the first time in my life. One of my sons was singing, ‘Is This the Way to Amarillo’ on the seat in front of me. The other was flicking a V sign at a photographer. My husband was missing. I had the complexion of a vine-grown vegetable. Sam Morton, Hollywood megastar and all-round demigod, was grinning at me. And, dear God, help me…My nipples were winking right back.
CARLY CALLING…
Carly to Kate and Carol:
Hv arivd safe–flight nightmare, sam colectd us–God, he’s ugly. On way to slum in Hollywd Hills now. Lifes a bitch. PS: Anyone spk to Mark?
Carol:
Glad all ok–kiss my nephews for me. Not spkn to Mark–but don’t worry, he’ll come around. Lv ya, Cxx
Kate:
Give ugly bloke our lv. Mrk came here 4 tea 2nite–not happy–sorry, babe, ul hv 2 accpt that he wl not cm around 2 this. Tk care, kiss boys, miss u, Kxx
Step Four
‘Does he ever just talk?’ Sam asked as Benny splashed around in the pool, defying the laws of physics and biology by swallowing water and singing at the same time. He was on verse three of the Jungle Book’s ‘Bare Necessities’.
‘Not often,’ I replied. ‘If he wants something really badly, like the food and water required to sustain life, and there’s no relevant musical reference, then he might try stringing a sentence together. I’ve decided it’s a small price to pay for his obvious talent, but if he’s not making millions in a boy band by the time he’s sixteen then I’m trading him in for another model.’
‘Why on earth would you want him to be in a boy band? Think of the pressure,’ Sam countered.
‘Yeah, but think of the chicks! He’ll love me for it.’
There was a shriek from the pool as Mac dive-bombed into the centre. Did I mention that we were at a pool? A private pool. With streams and waterfalls and dinghy things. And a fountain in the middle. Of course, I’m not so superficial that I’m impressed by such materialistic ostentation, but if I was a guy I’d have had a hard-on.
Sam’s house had completely surpassed my expectations. Since my sole experience of LA real estate came from MTV’s Cribs, I expected a sleek glass exterior, black and chrome interior, Louis Vuitton wallpaper, with solid gold Jacuzzis in every bathroom and plasma TVs dropping out of the ceiling every twenty feet. I was thinking flash, I was thinking bling, I was thinking a bugger to get around it all with a bottle of Windolene.
Instead, the house was like an old Spanish hacienda. Granted, it was the approximate size of Alicante, but it had a rustic charm–sort of a cross between a five-star hotel in Mexico and Zorro’s weekend pad.
The only slightly worrying thing was that the house was built into the side of a hill in the upmarket and very beautiful Pacific Palisades area. Good points: amazing views over Santa Monica and right to the beach. Bad points: three words: San. Andreas. Fault. But hey, since I was sitting by a private pool with a fountain, I decided that I’d concentrate on counting my lucky stars and worry about irrelevant things like an earthquake sending us crashing down a mountain to an excruciatingly painful death some other time.
Benny waddled over, soaking wet, hair standing upright.
‘Sleep,’ he mumbled.
‘See, I told you he could talk,’ I said to Sam, as I enveloped Benny in a towel and he climbed on top of me and nuzzled in for a snooze. I never, ever want my boys to stop doing that. For the rest of their lives it should be mandatory that they snuggle down with their head on their mother’s shoulder for a nap. Granted, it will be somewhat embarrassing when they are twenty-two and their girlfriends are watching.
‘So…?’ ventured Sam cagily.
‘So what?’
‘Sooooooo…When are you going to tell me what happened with Mark?’
Ah, I was wondering how long it would take him.
We’d been there for four glorious, sun-baked hours. I was just beginning to acclimatise to the heat. I was busy trying to forget that I’d had lustful and impure thoughts about my ex-boyfriend. I was thinking how much the man I married would have loved this, once upon a time before he was kidnapped by the zombie cult of the London Commuter and turned into a workaholic android. I was getting goose bumps watching my boys having the time of their lives in the private pool. I was wondering whether I’d get arrested if I popped over to Jackie’s house and announced that her long-lost daughter had come back to her and, oh, by the way, could I be in the will now? I was having orgasmic tremors at the fact that Sam’s housekeeper, Eliza, was unpacking my luggage. Although what she thought of my seven grey bras, I’d rather not know. Mental note: underwear shopping required on a major scale. I hadn’t updated my gussets since my last doomed seduction attempt, so to hell with the credit-card bill, my nethers deserved a treat.
The one thing I wasn’t doing was emotional distress and contemplation.
‘Sam, do you want to see me cry ag
ain? It’s already taken three icepacks for the swelling in my eyes to go down.’
He shrugged his shoulders and stayed silent. Doh! I always hated it when he did that. He knew me too well. He knew that I was hopeless at letting things lie, at allowing things to remain unspoken. If he’d immediately changed the subject, I would have been fine, but the minute there was an uneasy silence my gob became jet-propelled and I coughed up information like a mob grass with his willy in a vice.
And how could I possibly pour out my heart to the near-naked Adonis who was lying less than three feet away from me? I was far too busy contemplating much more serious issues like how if I squinted in a certain way his chest looked like a silhouette of the Andes.
I hadn’t phoned Mark yet. I couldn’t. A paralysing medical condition, Latin term Sulkus Extremis, prohibited my fingers from pressing the buttons on the phone. Besides, it was after midnight in the UK now and far be it from me to disturb His Indispensable Legal Holiness from his slumbers. My stomach lurched. God, I missed him. Or at least I would once the whole blind bloody fury thing subsided.
Back in the present world, the pause was so pregnant it was about to give birth to triplets, so I crumbled and told Sam everything that had happened between Mark and me lately. Well, not quite everything. I might have vaguely alluded to the woeful reality that my sex life was about as exciting as a weekend at a plumbing convention but I refrained from going into too much detail. Somehow it seemed disrespectful to discuss our inadequacies in that department when Mark’s son was in earshot. Benny might look like he was sleeping but kids were like sponges–bendy and high on absorption. I didn’t want it all coming back to him twenty years on when he was lying on a psychiatrist’s couch. ‘Doctor, I feel tortured and unable to maintain intimate relationships with women and I’m sure it’s all down to the trauma of hearing my mother bad-mouthing my dad’s performance when I was two and three-quarters.’
I stuck to the facts: I wanted to come here, Mark refused, so I was sitting by a pool in LA and he was on ‘Pot Noodle for one’ for the next month. A cloud of despondency had crept over me just by contemplating the state of my marriage.
‘What do you think?’ I asked Sam, when my rambling came to an end. ‘Woeful or what?’
‘Woeful,’ he agreed.
‘Cheers for that incisive, intuitive analysis. You’re obviously wasting your life being a multi-million-dollar-a-year actor when you could have a very successful career with Relate.’
I shrugged off the gloom. The sun was shining and I have a gene that makes it physically impossible to be on a downer while lying on a sun-lounger. Time for salacious gossip.
‘Anyway, enough about me. Which young nubile star of a weekly beach-based drama are you tampering with this week?’
He smiled and rolled his eyes. ‘Don’t laugh.’
I grinned. ‘I won’t.’
‘You will.’
‘I won’t.’
‘You will.’
‘Look, Sam, trust me. I’m a knackered mother of two with jetlag and a missing husband–I can assure you that I lost my sense of humour long ago. I’m a dour-faced cow, I promise. I will not laugh. I will not even smile. I’ll be a paragon of passiveness and nonchalance. So spill.’
‘I’m single. Haven’t seen anyone for over a year.’
At which point I spluttered into such convulsions of mirth that I woke up Benny.
‘You. Are. Kidding,’ I spluttered. ‘Or lying.’ I shushed Benny back to sleep lest he burst into song and ruin the moment.
Well, well, well. Sam Morton, single. Same sentence. Never thought it could happen. And for a whole year? ‘Not even any one-night stands or illicit fumbles?’
‘None.’
‘But why?’
I was astonished. Let’s put this in context. It was like a gifted artist locking away his paints. Or a serial shoplifter boycotting Marks & Spencer during the January sales.
Was he sick? Was he stricken with unrequited love for a world-famous but very married actress? Had his publicists hushed up the fact that he’d actually spent the last twelve months in jail?
I knew whatever it was must be serious. Profound. Deep.
‘Can’t be arsed,’ he confessed in a non-profound, definitely-not-deep tone. ‘It’s just not worth the hassle. Carly, I spend most of the year away on location or promoting a movie. There’s no stability, no permanence. And to be honest, not many opportunities to meet someone.’
‘What about your co-stars?’ I replied, still dumbfounded.
‘Yeah, great idea. But can I just remind you that I spent the last nine months shooting a prison movie with Bruce Willis, Will Smith and The Rock. Somehow I think that flowers and a subtle chat-up line would have resulted in mourners being directed to my graveside.
‘And besides, sounds crazy, but I’m trying to shake off the assumptions.’
I was confused. ‘What assumptions?’
‘When I came here it was because of my movie. There it was–life story, no secrets. Closet open, skeletons out. I was Sam Morton, that bloke who’d been an escort for rich women. I was pretty sure it would be a one-movie wonder and once the curiosity factor wore off I’d take the money and run back to Asia. And that would have been fine. But it didn’t happen. I got more roles, the dosh went up, and the publicity was positive considering this country is the last bastion of the morally righteous. But then, they love a reformed sinner, and by making Play the Game I’d spent two hours and ten minutes in a public confessional. So I stayed and made a go of it, and it worked. But now when I meet someone they’ve already made their mind up about me. Some of them just want to find out if the sex lives up to the hype. Some want publicity or the cash from a shag and spill. And the decent ones–well, I think they’d probably run a mile.’
That last thought hung in the air. I could see his point. Putting to one side for a moment the fact that he was now loaded and therefore devastatingly attractive to very shallow women, gold-diggers and religious cults, Sam’s dodgy career history meant that to most females he sat on the ‘Great Catch’ league table somewhere between bird flu and a sexually transmitted disease. But, as I’d thought many times over the years, at least he was honest. How many toxic bachelors fuck every girl in sight, swearing undying love to each and every one of them, all the while knowing that if they were linked up to a bullshit detector it would be wailing like a smoke alarm in a sauna?
Sam was always honest. And although it seems like a contradiction, he had integrity. And honour. And a good heart. And a female would be crazy to overlook that just because he’d dabbled for a while in a career that involved being butt naked and asking for credit-card details at the end of every shift.
Yep, she’d be mad. Crazy. Nuts.
I kissed Benny on the head and glanced in Mac’s direction. He was wrestling with an inflatable alligator in the shallow end.
I couldn’t look at Sam because I didn’t want to see his expression. Would it be matter-of-fact? Probing? Accusatory? Sad?
Because, after all, I knew the real Sam Morton and I loved him. Once upon a time I’d loved him more than anyone else on earth. Yet still…hadn’t I run for the moral hills when I’d found out about his venture into the escort services?
There was a long, pensive silence while I digested this. I had. I’d bolted. I hadn’t even had the courage to try and overlook that one transgression. How unforgiving was I? After all, it wasn’t as if he’d been caught with twenty-seven bodies under the floorboards. He had sex with lots of women. So did Tom Jones, and women still threw their knickers at him.
But then, I thought with a sigh, wasn’t it all just a case of fates and destinies? If I’d given Sam another go then Mark and I wouldn’t be together. Although I suppose I should really qualify that with ‘together–in a 5,382 miles apart and having the kind of stand-off normally championed by men with sombreros’ kind of way.
And if Mark and I weren’t together then I wouldn’t be living in London. Nor would I be permanently sk
int. I wouldn’t be fighting my way through 4×4 traffic hell every morning to get the kids to school. I wouldn’t know the names of all the ladies who work on the checkouts at Asda. Oh no, I wouldn’t have all those wonderful gifts that came with choosing to love Mark Barwick. Instead, I’d be living in Pacific Palisades, borrowing cups of sugar from the Hanks next door, asking my chef what was for tea and counting my Prada bags. I’d have to suffer the superficiality of private jets and unlimited charge cards. I’d have bloody blisters from trundling up and down Rodeo Drive. Oh, it would be shite. A nightmare. Horrible. And worst of all, I’d have to suffer the trauma of going to bed every night with a man who made Brad Pitt look average, who was anatomically gifted and who hadn’t commanded the highest rates in the free world for his sexual proclivities just because he was nice to talk to.
God, I’d had a lucky escape. Phew. Giddy relief.
Excuse me, I’m just off to find a whip with which to flagellate myself until I weep.
I was roused from my contemplation by Mac, who had sauntered over, leaving a trail of conquered inflatable animals behind him.
‘Mum, did you see me, did you, did you, did you? I killed ten whole dinosaurs!’
‘I saw you, honey, and you were fantastic! So brave and fearless and not in the least bit worrying!’
Sam laughed, and in an instant the tense atmosphere was dispelled.
‘So listen, how would you like to go and see the REAL Spiderman tomorrow?’
Mac screamed and literally jumped for joy. I hoped that puddle around him was caused by the fact he’d recently alighted from the swimming pool.
‘Yes, Uncle Sam, can we, can we, please?’
I wondered what age he’d be before he stopped repeating every question at least twice.
Benny squirmed on my chest–no doubt roused by a combination of Mac screaming and hunger.
Two minutes ago I’d been deep in thought about lost love and regrets–now I was contemplating disinfecting a poolside deck and pondering how I was going to break the news that it was unlikely that Sam’s freezer contained fish fingers and chunky chips.
