Leading Man (20 page)

Sammy reached across the table and took my hand again. “This is LA,” she said. “I’m sure we can find a clown nose somewhere.”

The devil was stabbing the angel with a salad fork.

I’m not going to go into all the gory, romance novel details. How Sammy invited me up to her hotel suite. How the second the door closed I took her into my arms and kissed her. How my heart pounded as she led me to the bedroom and my fingers trembled as I fumbled with the buttons on her blouse. I could tap out thousands of purple words describing every pulsing, throbbing minute.

But it wasn’t like that. It felt more like a homecoming. Or a return from Babylonian exile. After years of wandering in the desert, I’d finally found my way back to the promised land. I’d fantasized about it for so long, it was surreal to actually experience it. I couldn’t believe it was really happening. Being with Sammy again was both exquisitely familiar and breathtakingly new. The softness of her touch, the sweetness of her taste, the rhythms of her breathing—it was like biting into a Proustian cookie from an erotic bakery. When Sammy gently nibbled my earlobe, I could have wept with joy. That little maneuver drove me crazy back when we were teenagers. I couldn’t believe she remembered.

In a lot of ways, it reminded me of our first times together, when we snuck around behind our parents’
backs for secret sleepover dates. All these years later, we were still slinking off to share forbidden fruit. The difference, though, was that we weren’t so innocent anymore. We’d grown up. We’d seen this movie before. When I looked into Sammy’s eyes, I used to see hope and joy and yearning for the adventure of the future. Now I saw fatigue and sorrow and longing for the past.

When I woke up the following morning, I was alone and hungover in Sammy’s bed at the Shui. I sat up and looked around. Our clothes were strewn all over the floor. A lamp on the bedside table had been knocked over. There was pretentious stenciling on the wall above my head. dream, it said. No, I thought. This time I’m wide awake. Then I heard Sammy’s voice coming from the living room. She was talking on the phone. “Yes, it’s going to be fine, I promise,” I heard her saying. “The studio is really excited about you doing the commentary. They’re going to have technicians come to the apartment with all the equipment. You won’t have to go anywhere …”

Johnny. I’d forgotten about him. Little bubbles of guilt began floating to the surface of my consciousness. I tried to push them down. I thought about what Sammy said in the elevator on the way up to her room. Her theory, she explained as she nuzzled my neck, was that sleeping with me would be a less egregious form of adultery, since we’d already slept together so many times before she got married. “What’s one or two more?” she said. “I mean, who’s counting?” It was sloppy math, based on drunken logic, but in the moment, with Sammy’s breath on my chest, it all added up.

In the sobering light of morning, though, as I lay in
Sammy’s bed eavesdropping on her phone call with her husband, I reassessed the situation. You didn’t need teams of Swiss psychologists working round the clock to figure out what was going on in Sammy’s head. She
was
lonely. She
was
vulnerable. She needed to escape, if only for a night. She loved the man she married but, despite what she told Larry King, he wasn’t functioning in that department anymore. Sammy was only human. Even saints have needs.

I, of course, had been plotting and scheming and praying for this night for more than a decade. But it’s one thing to game out theoretical counterfactuals in the privacy of your own skull; it’s quite another to wake up in the real world and find yourself in a married woman’s bed. What was going to happen next? Would Sammy march into the bedroom and announce that it had all been a terrible mistake, let’s forget the whole thing ever happened, order room service before you go? Or was this the start of something more? Did I even want something more? Now that it was an actual, genuine possibility, did I truly want her back? After so much time and distance and one-sided longing between us, I couldn’t tell anymore. Besides, what if we got caught? With paparazzi hiding behind every bush, that was a real danger. I could see my picture in the papers, the jerk who broke up Johnny and Sammy. I’d become a tabloid punching bag, the Yoko Ono of celebrity brain cancer.

And then there was Eliska. Had I betrayed her by sleeping with Sammy? I couldn’t decide. It sure
felt
like I had been unfaithful. I thought about all the others I’d hurt over the years, the vast conga line of women I had
unceremoniously dumped when things started getting too serious. They were the casualties of my obsession with Samantha. I didn’t want Eliska to be another. Yet here I was, in another woman’s bed. In Sammy’s bed. I ducked under the covers and groaned.

“Sorry about that,” Samantha said when she stepped back into the bedroom wrapped only in a fluffy terrycloth robe. She sat down on the side of the bed. “Are you okay?” she asked, grinning awkwardly. “Are you feeling weird about, you know, last night?”

“Um, no, not at all,” I said, not terribly convincingly. It’s funny, but in my fantasies, all my relationship issues vanished into thin air the minute Sammy and I got back together. After all, she was the one who gave me those issues in the first place. But it wasn’t working out that way.

“I know I should be feeling horrible,” Sammy said. “I know I should be wracked with guilt. I’m sure I will be at some point. A big freak-out is coming, I’m sure. But right now, I feel great.” She lay down on the bed next to me and rested her head on my chest. “I feel like I’m seventeen again. I feel like we’ve gone back in time. Like we’ve got our whole lives ahead of us again.”

Something was terribly wrong. I didn’t feel that way at all. I still felt love for her, of course. But something was different, something was definitely not right. I didn’t know what, but I knew I needed to get out of that hotel room to figure it out.

There was an e-mail from Eliska waiting for me when I got home from my night with Sammy. “I have a confession,” she wrote. “You are not my first pen pal. When I was ten, our teacher gave us the addresses of children all over the Soviet Union. We were supposed to write them in order to improve our Russian language skills. My pen pal was named Illya and he lived in Leningrad. Most kids wrote only one or two letters before they got bored, but Illya and I kept writing and writing. We ended up writing each other for almost a year. But then, when Illya turned twelve, he got a girlfriend, and he stopped writing me. I guess you could say he was my first heartbreak.”

There was a smiley emoticon indicating that last line was a joke. Or maybe it was Abraham Lincoln kissing a penguin—I could never really tell what Eliska’s emoticons were supposed to be. I read her words several more times, imagining Eliska as a young girl at the height of the Cold War, trapped behind the Iron Curtain in Czechoslovakia, peering out the window of a snow-encrusted dacha,
waiting anxiously for a letter from a boy in Leningrad. I could practically hear
Doctor Zhivago
’s theme music. Under normal circumstances, I’d have written her back right away, but I clicked the e-mail closed. These weren’t normal circumstances. I would have to find time for Eliska later.

I was freaking out over Sammy. Worse, I was freaking out over the fact that I was freaking out. I couldn’t figure out what the hell my problem was. Hadn’t I wanted this for years? Then why couldn’t I shake the nagging feeling that I had made a big mistake? Of course, I always had a nagging feeling I’d made a big mistake whenever I got close to a woman, but this felt different. This wasn’t the same old gamophobia. I wasn’t imagining thick ankles or hallucinating veiny arms; this wasn’t about my fear of intimacy or inability to commit. This time I was pretty sure I really had screwed up.

I kept thinking about what Sam had said—how I knew her better than anybody. I realized that was only half true. I knew everything there was to know about twenty-four-year-old Sammy, from how many pumps of butter she liked on her movie popcorn to what sort of bristles she preferred on her toothbrush. Presumably, at thirty-seven, she still enjoyed three pumps and a medium-hard brush, but in other ways she was a completely different person. So was I. We weren’t candy-eyed tweens sharing ice cream in a sofa sleeper in a Greenwich Village studio anymore. We were supposed to be grown-ups.

I realized something else, as well. All those years I spent lying in wait, posing as Sammy’s platonic buddy as part of my elaborate ruse to win her back—turned out I
wasn’t entirely pretending. When she called at two a.m. to talk about Johnny’s latest medical crisis, or some career setback of her own, or whatever, I wasn’t feigning my sympathy. I genuinely did care. I truly wanted to be there for her to lean on. All along I may have been scheming and plotting, but that didn’t mean I was faking my feelings. I barely noticed it was happening, but over countless late-night calls and catching-up dinners, Sammy and I got close in a way I hadn’t anticipated. Maybe she wasn’t really the One—maybe she never had been—but she was something else that was almost as rare and nearly as valuable. A real friend.

I just hoped I hadn’t messed it up with a one-night stand at the Shui.

I didn’t bother to check for an e-mail from Sammy—she was still on her flight back to New York. But I knew there wouldn’t be an e-mail even after she landed. Sammy hated e-mail. When it came to letter writing, she believed in the sanctity of stationery. When she contacted me again it would either be with a handwritten note or, more likely, a late-night phone call. I had no idea what was going through her mind. She didn’t offer any clues when I left her packing her bags in her hotel suite. She simply gave me a long, slow hug at the door, kissed me gently on the lips, then stepped back and adjusted the belt on her bathrobe. “Don’t forget to write,” she said, smiling. She hadn’t used that line on me in years, but it was her favorite parting back in our college days, when she was still encouraging me to become a journalist.

But I knew what had to be done. As her friend, I couldn’t complicate her life with an affair that she only
thought she wanted because she was lonely. I had to nip it in the bud before it went any further. I took a deep breath and made myself a promise: no matter what Sammy was thinking, no matter what she might be planning for us, I had to be the strong one and do the right thing.

Meanwhile, there was an e-mail from Carla. She was assigning me an interview with Suki Monroe, whoever that was. This was starting to happen a lot; Carla would assign me a story on a celebrity I had never heard of before. It seemed that nobody wanted to read about old-fashioned movie stars anymore. Instead, in 2008, a brand-new crop of “reality” stars with funny, unfamiliar names—like Kardashian and Gosselin and Obama—were sucking up all the oxygen in the media. Every season, I felt myself falling more and more out of step with my once beloved pop culture. Worse than out of step—half the time I was horrified by what I was seeing. Movies based on theme park rides. TV dating shows for midgets. Taylor Hicks. I was just shy of thirty-eight, but already I was aging out of the target demographic. The culture was moving on without me.

Suki Monroe, it turned out, was indeed a reality star, of a sort. She was the flamboyant, hugely successful restaurateur who had just opened a new theme eatery on Hollywood Boulevard called Celebrity. It was one of those brilliant ideas that makes you wonder why nobody had thought of it before: a place where unfamous paying customers could experience, for a couple of hours, what it was like to be Jack Nicholson. From the moment you
arrived at Celebrity’s red-carpeted entrance (where fake paparazzi pretended to take your picture) you were treated like a member of the A-list. You’d get ushered past a line of waiting customers (or, rather, a bunch of extras being paid to look like customers) and escorted directly to your table, the best in the house (like every table at Celebrity). At least once during your meal, you’d be approached by a (paid) fan asking for an autograph. “In the future,” promised Celebrity’s Warholian advertising slogan, “everybody will be famous for three courses.”

“I know you don’t normally write about restaurants,” Carla wrote in her e-mail assigning me the story, “but this seems right up your alley. It’s all about your favorite subject—fame! The interview is set for Friday night. Dinner at Celebrity.
Bon appétit.”

She was not Asian, nor was she related in any way to Marilyn. Her real name was Janice Smith, but she changed it to the more attention-grabbing Suki Monroe when, at seventeen, she left Ohio for Los Angeles to pursue a career as an actress. When that didn’t work out, Suki pursued producers. She ended up marrying and divorcing three of them over a period of fifteen years. With the money she made from those profitable failures she opened her first restaurant in West Hollywood in 1996. It was called Formaggio alla Griglia, and it wowed the LA food world by giving the lowly grilled cheese sandwich a gourmet makeover and turning it into a sexy, decadent treat. Three years later, Suki jumped into LA’s cutthroat high-end cupcake business by opening her first Shut Your Pie Hole cupcake
shop. Within two years, she controlled Los Angeles’s small baked goods trade with the iron grip of a mafia boss.

From everything that I read about her in the clip file, she was as flaky as she was formidable. For starters, she wore a turban, not a look you saw a lot of in LA since Tallulah Bankhead passed away. For another, she was such a devoted animal activist she once tried to ban fur-wearing customers from eating in her restaurants (she reluctantly rescinded the edict after the
Los Angeles Times
pointed out how many swine were slaughtered every month to fill croque monsieur sandwiches at Formaggio alla Griglia). But Suki could also be ruthless. A few years back, she made a play for the ultimate culinary trophy in Hollywood—catering the Governors Ball at the Oscars. When Wolfgang Puck beat back her challenge, Suki took it hard. In an interview with
Los Angeles Magazine
, she dismissively referred to Puck as “Ronald McDonald with a Düsseldorf accent.” As far as I could tell from the clips, she still hadn’t apologized.