Leading Man (14 page)

“I’m not really interested in film,” she told me, her Slavic accent reminding me of every TV spy girl I’d lusted after as a teenager. “Not Hollywood movies, anyway. But I earn enough money translating on one movie set to last me most of the year.”

“Would you like to have a cup of coffee with me after you’re done here tonight?” I asked her. I figured I had one more evening in Prague before I headed on to Cambodia, so why not give it a shot. “We could talk about Hannah Arendt if you want,” I added. “I happen to be an expert on Hannah Arendt.”

“Really?” she asked, cocking an eyebrow. “You are an expert on
The Origins of Totalitarianism
?”

“Well, no,” I said. “I just said that so you’d have coffee with me.”

Eliska looked at me for a long moment, trying to figure out whether I was charming or just an idiot. Then she
cracked up. For the time being, she was giving me the benefit of the doubt. “Okay,” she said. “We can have coffee.”

We did not have coffee. Instead, we met later that evening in a bar in Old Town Square and sipped Becherovka, a disgusting Czech aperitif that tastes like shag carpet and Sterno. One of the advantages of being a professional journalist is that you get lots of practice asking strangers questions. Frankly, it was one of the main things I had going for me when out on a date. Most men jaw on about themselves, trying to impress women with puffed-up tales of their conquests and achievements. But the smarter way to attract the female is to let her do all the talking. Ask a lot of questions. Feign interest. Works like a charm.

With Eliska, though, it was not so easy. Like many beautiful women—and Eliska was stunning, with cheekbones that could make a supermodel weep—she had a lot of practice deflecting attention, especially from men. At first, conversation with her was like waging a verbal siege. Whatever line I tried to fling over her ramparts came bouncing off her walls without making the slightest dent. It was only after she had a couple of glasses of Sterno and shag carpet that I began to detect the cracks in her fortifications. “Don’t tell anyone,” she admitted, “but I’m not the greatest translator in the world. This is only the second movie set I’ve worked on. I don’t have the personality for it. I get too nervous and I screw up all the time.” As if on cue, she knocked over the vase on the tabletop while pulling off her sweater. “Ugh,” she said. “I am an elephant in Chinatown!”

Eventually, I was able to tease out some details about
her life. I learned that she was twenty-eight and grew up in a small village in rural Czechoslovakia. That her father left her mother when Eliska was a year old. That her mom ended up working night shifts as a receptionist in a state coal mine. “You know,” she told me after her third Becherovka, “when I was a child, we thought America was so wonderful. It seemed so big and glamorous and far away. In fact, the word we used for ‘cool’ was ‘America.’ If somebody was wearing a cool T-shirt, we’d say, ‘Wow, that T-shirt is so
America.’
Now, of course,” she added with a smile, “we know better. Now everybody
hates
America.” Later on in the evening, I learned that there was even some Cold War intrigue in Eliska’s family history: When she was seven years old, her mother got her heart broken by a man who ended up defecting to West Germany. “But he sent us such magnificent gifts,” Eliska said, smiling. “He once sent me a denim catsuit. We couldn’t get real denim under the Communist regime. Only this cheap imitation stuff. But that catsuit was very cool. It had an ABBA patch on the back pocket. All my friends were jealous.”

“So America,” I said.

Growing up behind the Iron Curtain, I quickly discovered, had left Eliska with some enormous pop-cultural gaps. There was a vast swath of pre-Glasnost entertainment that had literally been walled off from her childhood.
The Monkees, The Brady Bunch
,
Gilligan’s Island
—none of them rang a bell with her. “When I was a kid, my mother and I would sometimes watch
Dynasty
, when the signal would drift over the border from the west,” she offered. “We didn’t know what they were saying—it was dubbed in German—but we loved it. We even loved the commercials.”

To be fair, I wasn’t exactly an expert on Czech pop culture. Eliska told me about the films she grew up with, ethereal, timeless fairy tales with titles like
The Proud Princess
and
Three Nuts for Cinderella
. She tried to explain the “Mister Egg” advertisements of her childhood, a Communist-era TV campaign for state-produced farm products that featured a dapper animated chicken egg in a top hat, but it had as much resonance to me as Mr. Clean or the Maytag repairman commercials did to her. We could have been Martians to each other, for all the pop-cultural references we had in common. I found it a huge turn-on.

After a while, when we’d had enough Becherovka and it was time for Eliska to go home, I walked with her through Old Town Square, where we paused at Prague’s famous fifteenth-century Astronomical Clock. We arrived just in time to hear its chimes ring and watch the ancient wind-up wooden figure of Death pop out for his top-of-the-hour dance with the Seven Deadly Sins, like Hell’s own cuckoo. Some six hundred years before Walt Disney built his famous pirate ride, the Czechs already possessed the technology to make creepy wooden robots that could scare the crap out of little kids. Impressive.

After Death finished his mechanical dance and retired for another hour, I leaned in to give Eliska a kiss. I’d been thinking about doing it all night, but for some reason was having trouble plucking up my courage. Normally, I wasn’t at all shy about first kisses. On the contrary, I loved the adrenaline rush of the chase, the thrill of fresh conquest; it was only later on, after I’d kissed a girl for the fourth or fifth time, as a threat of a relationship began to form, that I started getting nervous. But with Eliska,
it was different. She made me feel like Fred Astaire in
Silk Stockings
, wooing comrade Cyd Charisse with his decadent capitalistic charm. As far as I was concerned, that moment in Old Town Square couldn’t have been more romantic if I’d been wearing a top hat and tails and Eliska a silvery ball gown. I wanted to sweep the girl off her feet. I wanted to knock her socks off.

“What was the purpose of that?” she asked when it was over, scratch-cutting me back to reality. She didn’t sound angry or even all that annoyed. She just seemed curious to hear my explanation for what she obviously considered irrational behavior. “You live thousands of miles away,” she said. “You are leaving Prague tomorrow. You will never see me again. What was the point of kissing? What possible good could come of it?”

It was a good question. Sure, Eliska was beautiful, smart, and charming—that had a lot to do with why I kissed her. She also had that sexy spy girl accent that made me want to stuff her into a car trunk and smuggle her across Checkpoint Charlie. But she was right. I did live thousands of miles away. I probably wouldn’t see her again. There was no point in kissing at all. It was the story of my life: the only women I ever wanted were the ones I couldn’t have. Samantha. Czech translators who lived on the other side of the planet.

“Do you think I could see you again before I go?” I asked Eliska. “Would that be possible? Would you meet me for breakfast tomorrow? I have time before my flight. Maybe just a cup of coffee?”

Eliska considered the request. It seemed like she was making a big decision. “If you want,” she finally said,
shrugging her shoulders, “you could meet me near the Charles Bridge. I have an appointment nearby.” She jotted the name of an intersection and some other numbers on a piece of scrap paper and handed it to me. “But I don’t know why you would want to meet me. It makes no sense.”

The next morning, before going to the airport, I did indeed stop at the intersection near the Charles Bridge. I waited fifteen minutes. Then another fifteen minutes. But Eliska never showed.

If this book were the movie constantly playing out in my head, everything at this point would get all wavy again as we dissolved out of the flashback and returned to Cambodia. DeeDee Devry has just finished making me perspire more than Richard Nixon in a Swedish sauna. I’m strolling across a pothole-filled strip of tarmac at Siem Reap Airport and boarding a tiny twenty-seat rice-paddy jumper bound for Hong Kong, where I’ll have a five-hour layover before getting on a jumbo jet for the sixteen-hour flight back to America. I am at the end my grand tour.

Somewhere over Vietnam, though, my plane got struck by lightning. We’d been in the air maybe twenty minutes when the tiny cabin was suddenly flooded with a flash of blue light, followed a millisecond later by a loud popping noise. That was it. Nothing else bad happened. But because none of the flight attendants spoke English, it took a while for them to convince me it was okay to remove my head from between my knees.

When we landed at Hong Kong International, I headed right for the bar inside the first-class lounge. It was too
early in the morning for straight vodka, so I ordered a Bloody Mary. It wasn’t just the lightning bolt that had spooked me. Getting stood up on that bridge in Prague had rattled me, too, and that weirdness with Devry at Angkor Wat didn’t help much either. Clearly something was wrong. My mojo was on the fritz. I needed to get it looked at. It was turning me into a wreck.

I ordered a second Bloody Mary and turned my attention to the flat-panel video monitor hanging on a wall. A young Asian lad of about ten had slipped away from his parents and commandeered the remote control. He was speed-flipping through hundreds of cable channels. I watched as the collective cultures of a dozen civilizations flickered across the TV. Chinese game shows, Australian soap operas, Taiwanese dish-washing soap commercials—I got a few seconds of each as the kid raced through the dial. And then, for an instant, an all-too-familiar face appeared on the screen. Samantha’s.

It was that home video footage of ten-year-old Sammy wading into the ocean on Cape Cod, the same tape her parents had given
20/20
for its interview last year. A Hong Kong channel was using the clip, along with dozens of others, for their own special on Mr. and Mrs. Mars. After a brief tug-of-war with the kid over the remote, I was able to turn up the volume and listen to the Chinese TV hosts talk about my ex-girlfriend, even though I didn’t understand a word of their Cantonese. Mars hadn’t been doing any public appearances lately—his worsening condition made it too difficult—but even in Southeast Asia the media continued to be fascinated by his tragic plight. I couldn’t believe it. Samantha was still haunting me from
the other side of the screen. No matter where I went, no matter how far away, I couldn’t escape her.

After a couple more Bloody Marys, I realized that the gecko in my hotel room in Siem Reap had been right. It was time for me to wake up. It was beginning to dawn on me that I’d spent decades chasing after shadows on screens. I could no longer tell who was real in my life and who was a one-dimensional illusion. Seeing Sammy’s face on Hong Kong TV made me see that I had romanticized her exactly the same way I idealized movie stars. I put them both atop the same pedestal—with everybody else crushed underneath. And if that was the case, what did it say about my feelings for Sam, about what our relationship had been, really? Had it honestly been love? Or was it something more akin to what a fan feels toward a distant and unattainable object of adulation?

I thought about Sammy’s relationship with Johnny. I remembered her describing the grim daily routine of taking care of her husband. Helping him eat, dress, go to the bathroom—it required tireless, round-the-clock effort. I asked myself if I could do that for Samantha. Could I do it for anyone, period? I found it hard to imagine. I doubted I was capable of that kind of devotion. I couldn’t even handle veiny arms. Being slightly drunk in an airport halfway around the world put things into grim perspective. No wonder my relationships were doomed to failure. At thirty-five, I hadn’t grown up at all. On the contrary. I was reverting, de-maturing. I had been a far more advanced human being as an adolescent than I was as an adult. At least when I was a teen I had a girlfriend.

When I got back to New York, I took a long hard look at the life I’d built for myself in the city that never sleeps and decided to move to Los Angeles, the city that hits the snooze button and dozes till noon.

I pitched the move to Carla and my other bosses at
KNOW
as if I were volunteering to spy behind enemy lines. If I was ever going to truly understand the famous, I argued, I needed to live and hide among them. In truth, I just needed a change. I wanted to get away from the blare and bustle of Manhattan. Not to mention the disaster that was my social life. I’d pretty much exhausted my romantic opportunities among Robin’s actress friends—“You’ll never date below Fourteenth Street again,” she told me—and I wasn’t finding much love anywhere else in the city. Most of all, though, I was determined to get over Samantha. I had to finally accept that I was never going to get her back—Johnny’s illness made it impossible—and I wanted to put some distance between us. Twenty-five hundred
miles wasn’t enough—I couldn’t even avoid her in Hong Kong—but it would have to do.

I rented a cool, airy loft in the Venice Canals, my favorite part of LA. The canals were the brainchild of a kooky nineteenth-century tobacco mogul–turned–real estate developer named Abbot Kinney, who adored the Venice in Italy so much he decided, a hundred years ago, to re-create it on the beachfront south of Santa Monica. Even back then, Los Angeles was a mecca for lunatic dreamers. It’s hard to imagine anyone ever mistaking Kinney’s wacky waterway for its European inspiration, but the neighborhood still had lots of eccentric charm. The artists and photographers and film industry hipsters who were my neighbors would paddle around the canals in tiny wooden boats, feeding bread crumbs to the ducks that nested under the footbridges. At dusk, as the sun sank into the Pacific and the jasmine flowers scented the air like God’s own Glade fresheners, it was as magical as any village in Tuscany.