Fat Chance (9 page)

“Welcome,” he says, pecking my cheek. “Welcome to L.A.” I reach over and tug lightly on the visor of his cap.

“Thanks, Taylor,” I say, suddenly overcome with an unnerving calmness. “It's super to be here.”

T
he speedometer needle quivers at around 90, and the world seems to be fast-forwarding past my window. Taylor leans back, at ease, his right hand loosely guiding the wheel. I steal a glance at his profile as he chats, hoping to find some angle, some wrinkle, a fat pad maybe, an ice pick scar, an incipient boil, something that I can seize upon to make me feel that “AHA! See! Even
he
really isn't that perfect in person after all.” But, of course, there's nothing, not even an ingrown hair. Smooth tanned skin, a powerful neck, the perfectly sculpted jawline. A furtive glance at the way his faded jeans outline his muscular legs, the length of them, the worn black leather belt with the steel buckle, the swell of his zipper. Looking at Mike Taylor, it occurs to me that God has really put himself out. Gone that extra mile.

I study his features. The eyes dominate his face. Honey-brown, fringed with thick lashes. If he were female, he would have secured a lifetime contract with Maybelline. Okay, his
nose is just a mite too small—but all to the benefit of the eyes. Lips that are born to smile, that curl easily into a 1000-megawatt glow showing white teeth with just the barest hint of crookedness. Comfortable with himself, easy.

If he senses that I'm studying him, he doesn't let on. Used to that. He probably feels naked without eyes on him. We chat about the flight, how many years I've been doing the column, school—“NYU? Really? One of my directors taught at the film school”—and occasionally, he glances over at me offering that small, confident grin that my body registers in every molecule like a mini-Richter scale. He tells me how much he likes New York, and how sorry he is that he doesn't get there more often. I admire the car, and am about to change the conversation when he swerves off the road abruptly.

“Here, take over.”

“I…I don't know how to drive a stick—” I'm stuttering now. That's cool.

“Come on, I'll teach you, it's easy.”

“Now?”

“Now.” He jumps out and walks around the front of the car to my side.

“Slide over, go ahead, it'll be fun.”

Oh no. Well, at least I can now maneuver myself over the stick shift without becoming impaled on it and land—thump—in the driver's seat. Eight weeks ago, all of me would definitely not have made it. That accomplishment alone justified two months in the gulag of self-denial. The leather feels warm from his body. Can I learn to drive, feeling like this?

“Look,” Taylor says, jumping into the passenger seat and putting my hand over the smooth rounded head of the vibrating gearshift and covering it with his. It feels like…like… Oh God! My face is flushed.
Is he thinking what I'm thinking?
Our hands slide together—left then right. Up and down.
In… YES, YES.

“Neutral, okay? Now think of the shape of an
H.
” He moves it left and then up. “This is first, down to second, up, across and up here to third and then down to fourth. To go in reverse, you push it down across and back. Just remember to press down on the clutch when you shift, and ease your foot off the gas at the same time.” He looks deep into my eyes.

“You got it?”

No, I don't think so, let's do it again. Damn, the telltale blush.

“You sure you trust me with this baby?”

He sees it and smiles seductively. “It's only a car.”

“Tighten your seat belt,” I say, doing my most polished imitation of Bette Davis. “It's going to be a bumpy ride.” The car stalls at several points, and then lurches painfully at other junctures as I shift gears. We come to a fork in the road. As Yogi Berra said, “If you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

“Right,” Taylor says tolerantly. “Up that hill.”

I turn to him and pat his hand. “You okay?”

He buries his head down under his shirt. “Who, me?” But he's smiling. I reach a set of gates and he grabs the remote and punches in a code. The gate opens. Then I drive up a long winding driveway to a second set of gates. I nearly stop short when I reach the front door of a contemporary glass mansion.

“Not bad for a starter house,” I say, trying to sound blasé.

He smiles. “Three years ago, I couldn't have afforded the pool house. But that's what happens around here. Make-believe city.”

I pull up to a garage filled with L.A. status symbols—motorcycles, a Jaguar XKE, a vintage Thunderbird, a Range Rover, even a formula-something-or-other racing car. He smiles and gestures around. “My toys.”

“You better pull it in. I don't have enough collision insurance.”

“You can leave it right there. I'll show you around after you're settled in.” He springs out of the car and grabs my bag heading toward the front door. A moment after he opens it, I catch my own reflection flung back at me in the cold blue orbs of the skimpily clad Jolie Bonjour. She's dolled up in a black lace tank top and white cutoffs that are so cut off that they reveal the rounded bottom of her doll-size rear end.

“Jolie—Maggie,” Mike says.

“Alo,” she says with about as much enthusiasm as she would show to a tax auditor.

“She, ah, lives with me,” Taylor says.

“Great to meet you,” I say, graciously extending my hand, although I really felt like exhaling hard to see if I can blow her away, maybe all the way back to France. Introductions out of the way, he seems to forget Jolie.

“I'm sure you'll be really comfortable here,” he says, his voice trailing off as he climbs the staircase, two steps at a time. I start to follow him.

With Taylor out of earshot, Jolie turns to me. “I thought you were a
fat
columnist.”

That stops me. I turn around. Some Gaul. “I guess it's a matter of interpretation.”

Jolie remains at the bottom of the staircase, glaring up.

 

Architectural Digest
failed to do justice to the place. Aside from ten sun-flooded bedrooms—if I counted right—and an expansive living room, there is a library, a screening room, Taylor's office, his secretary's office, a gym bigger than the newsroom at the paper, and a kitchen with an island just smaller than Manhattan. The cabinets hold a kitchen computer stocked with international recipes, a TV, DVD player
and sound system. I have lost count of the phones. There is a pool, two tennis courts and a handball court. Why no polo field or Alpine ski run? Why would anyone ever leave this Xanadu?

Wherever I walk, I see tiny red flashing lights. Security is Pentagon tight. “A royal pain,” as Taylor puts it, but a necessary evil. I watch him sprawled out on the bed in what will be my room, marveling at his…at my good fortune, as he elaborates.

“I came home one night and found a dizzy blonde who had climbed through a window. I tried to talk her out the door with an autographed picture, but she pulled a knife and said she'd kill both of us if I didn't marry her.” He shakes his head in disbelief. “I thought it was just a fluke until about a week later. Another nutcase showed up, this time sitting out by the pool naked. She was waiting for me to make it with her. Said it was the right time of the month, that she had taken her temperature.”

“So you played along.”

Taylor snorts. “Yeah, I told her I was going to the bathroom first and locked myself in the john until the cops came. Now you know why I host the annual fundraiser for the Police Benevolent Association.”

In addition to the sensors inside and out (
and I thought Tex's police lock on his apartment door was excessive),
he tells me about the twenty-foot high fences. “Those went up the day that I saw a picture of myself inhaling an illegal drug.”

“Men in glass houses shouldn't get stoned.”

He smiles. “I see you're gonna be trouble.”

“So, does tight security mean that bells go off if I touch your arm?”

“Not quite. Anyway, you get used to it, and since I couldn't get arrested in this town for years, I'm not complaining
about the way things are…anyway, you hungry? I have a fridge packed with food.”

“I ate on the plane, but maybe just some iced tea and fruit?”

He seems taken aback, then shrugs it off. “Done. Let's go down.”

I can't help staring at the luminescent flecks that dance along the runway of black granite that is a kitchen counter, as if I am looking at a highway paved with diamonds.

“Do you
know
what a New Yorker would do for a kitchen this size? We cook in cubicles. If you're lucky, you can stretch your arms out to the side and make a 360 degree circle without banging into something.” He watches me, amused. I open the refrigerator and stare.

“Party here tonight?”

He shakes his head.

“Why so much food?”

He shrugs. “You're supposed to like to eat, no?”

“I don't eat THIS much. But I'll tell you what. I'll cook you dinner. What do you like?”

His eyes widen. “Everything. Whatever.”

“Why do you look so shocked?”

“The truth is that no one has made me a home-cooked meal since the last time I ate shepherd's pie at my mom's house in Des Moines, maybe six months back—and to tell you the truth, she's not such a hot cook.”

This surprises me. No women fawning over him, inviting him over for dinner? Maybe that wasn't an L.A. thing.

“Until I left home at eighteen, I thought mashed potatoes came out of boxes, and that gravy came in cans.”

“Doesn't Jolie cook?”

“Cook? All
she
eats are fruits and vegetables and a sprinkling of granola.” I see he's house-cleaned. There's nothing
resembling granola or soy milk here, at least not that I can see. He smiles. “On Thanksgiving—hey, that was a feast—she diced up a salad.”

Should I laugh or cry? “Well then, Super Sleuth,” I say, now comfortable enough to call him by the title of one of his movies, “tonight you're going to eat big-time, some delectable treats from the mother cuisine.” I look at his face. He has no clue. “Italian food. How does that sound?”

“I can't wait.”

“Good, now get out of the kitchen and go learn some lines or something. I'll find you when dinner's ready.”

“Whatever you say.” He salutes, and walks out of the kitchen, but then he turns back and leans up against the door and watches me.

“What?”

“I don't know,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck. “The house feels different now.”

“It's probably the first time you've seen someone other than the maid in your kitchen.”

He shakes his head. “It's not that. It's your energy…your…aura.”

“My aura? Now I'm sure I'm in California.”

He misses the cynicism. “Great,” he says, striding off. “Great.”

The overstocked refrigerator is like a giant orgasmatron. I inhale, get a grip on myself and then begin poking through shelf after shelf to come upon gastronomic glory in all shapes, scents, colors and tastes. It's like a VIP ticket to Fauchon, or the Food Halls of Harrods with the unlimited freedom to indulge. Obscene, excessive, overabundant—and alluring. And no one knows better than me what to do with all these delectables. The French Froz fruit had put Taylor's body into culinary deep freeze. I would shock him back to life.

After inventorying the contents, I decide on the menu:
Semolina cakes with butter and cheese, baked oysters Florentine, veal marsala, meatballs, manicotti, escarole with garlic, mesclun greens, and zabaglione with raspberries and blackberries. (Maybe this should be a column: See, I'm not dieting!!!)

I press the power button on the CD player and the kitchen comes alive with golden oldies by the Supremes—
Baby love, oh baby love, I need you, oh how I miss you.
What I really want to do is jump up on the kitchen counter and dance, swinging a wine bottle over my head, but afraid of being caught and appearing bipolar, I channel my euphoria by chopping and sautéing to the beat, infusing the air with the redolent bouquet of garlic, onions and wine sauce.

“What are you making? It should be illegal.” I jump. Taylor has crept into the kitchen behind me.

“Nuking Lean Cuisine.”

He lifts the lid on a pot, but I smack his hand.

“Don't you dare!”

“Sorry,” he says, lowering it. “Sorry. How about a little wine?”

“Let me guess, you have cases of the Richebourg '71, and as a backup, the Grand-Echezeaux '71 from the Domaine de la Romanee-Conti.”

“Huh?”

“Don't tell me you don't have a world-class
cave
packed with priceless selections.”

He shakes his head. “No
cave
. Don't know a damn about wine. I usually go with local California stuff—at least I can pronounce it. The only things goin' vintage in my cellar are the bones of producers who put me into pilots that went nowhere.” He pours two glasses of chardonnay ordinaire and lifts his. “To you and to our collaboration. And boy am I glad you can cook.”

I clink his glass a trifle too hard in return. “Here's to
Dangerous Lies,
the movie and all the ones I had to tell to get me here. Now if you want to eat tonight, I suggest you find something to do. I've got work ahead of me. See you at eight.”

“I'm off to the gym,” Taylor says. “If I'm going to feast tonight, I better get into shape.”