Little Known Facts: A Novel (23 page)

When you’re waiting for the reviews to come out, it’s like waiting for a hurricane to hit—you feel an almost unbearable tension and anxiety, but one that I think a lot of movie people are addicted to. To be talked about favorably, even fawningly; to see your name in the
New York Times,
the
Guardian, Le Monde, La Repubblica, Der Spiegel,
and any other major newspaper that still publishes movie reviews—this is one of the things people like me aspire to.

Some of the highlights—

More than 20 critics agree:
Bourbon at Dusk,
4 out of 4 stars. A masterpiece.
Bourbon at Dusk
is the year’s first must-see.

—New York Times

Elise Connor is a revelation, an actress of the finest caliber. A star has indeed been born.

—Los Angeles Times

Renn Ivins proves that he can write and direct with the same intelligence and suppleness with which he acts. You really need to see this movie. As with Spike Lee’s
When the Levees Broke,
Ivins and his co-writer Scott Jost have gotten to the heart of one of the biggest tragedies and failures of leadership in recent memory.

—The Oregonian

Marek Gilson is in his finest form. Think Newman and
The Hustler.

—Entertainment Weekly

If you see only one movie this year, make sure it’s
Bourbon at Dusk.
I can’t stop thinking about it.

—Chicago Tribune

A truly humane portrait of a New Orleans family struggling to survive both the communal and personal horrors of life after Hurricane Katrina.

—FilmCritic.com

One of the few bad ones (and try as I might, I can’t forget what this fucker wrote):

As if the world needs more tragedy porn. Ivins does a passable job as director, but couldn’t he have cast less pretty actors? Marek Gilson and Elise Connor spend half of the film looking like bewildered Abercrombie models plunked down in the middle of
Waterworld.

—The Miami Herald

Aside from the
Herald’
s
Waterworld
cheap shot, after I read the reviews, I felt like I wouldn’t need to sleep for about two weeks straight, like I could run a two-hour marathon or grow wings and fly to the top of Mount Kilimanjaro. It is one thing to be celebrated for a film you’ve done a good job acting in, quite another if it’s a film you’ve dreamed up on your own, written the screenplay for, hired the cast and crew, cobbled together the funding for, and then spent more than eight weeks in the sweltering heat of an on-location shoot and directed everyone to the best performances of their careers. This is my
Apocalypse Now,
my
On the Waterfront,
even, perhaps, my
Citizen Kane.
To celebrate, Elise and I flew up to Napa and had dinner at the French Laundry, where, in a stroke of mad generosity, I treated all the other diners to their meals. It cost me about twenty-eight thousand dollars, but I handed the waiter my credit card, and aside from making everyone’s day, I probably made some friends too.

No Palme d’Or, but the Best Picture Oscar isn’t out of reach. Reviews this good usually mean that it will stay in theaters for at least a month and then move on to the second-runs. After the Golden Globe nominations are announced in December, and a month or so later, the Oscars, the first-runs sometimes pick up the nominees again. I have some good foreign distributors too, and I’m confident that
Bourbon
is going to be a hit overseas. Foreign audiences love films about American tragedies. Our tragedies make their own, which are often worse, seem a little less terrible. There is also so much poetry in sadness, a very different and possibly more potent variety than the kind of poetry you find in happiness.

After Elise, Marek, and I went to the premieres in New York and Los Angeles with a number of other
Bourbon
people, we flew to London for the UK premiere, and afterward we had dinner with Mick Jagger, whom I’d met when we’d worked on a picture together several years earlier. Jagger is very worldly, self-possessed, and witty, and that night, he could not keep his eyes off Elise. I told myself that I should be used to this by now, but it’s hard for me to watch other famous men ogling her, especially if they are both a rock legend and a legendary womanizer.

Sometimes I think that I’d be happier if I broke it off with her and went out with a woman closer to my age, one who isn’t an actress, but I cannot see myself giving her up. I can’t imagine meeting another woman as beautiful, talented, and sweet-natured. Maybe two of the three, but no more. We’re either together until I die, or she will have to be the one to dump me.

Belle’s calls were arriving less frequently by the time
Bourbon
was released in the States, and Elise was in better spirits than she had been for a while, so we had a good time in England. But a week after the UK premiere, Elise had to leave for three weeks in Montreal for a new project, then two more in upstate New York before she’d be back in Los Angeles, where they’d wrap the film after one final week on a Paramount sound stage. I was going to be away for a few weeks too, doing a role in a French film that Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the genius behind Amelie, was directing. Aesthetically, we’re pretty different, but I love his films and he apparently really liked
Javier’s Sons
and
The Zoologist
and now
Bourbon.
When he approached me with the role for
The Hypnotist (L’Hypnotiseur),
it seemed a safe bet that we’d work well together, provided I let him do all the directing, which admittedly is getting harder as I get older. I often visualize how I’d shoot a scene instead, or how I’d have written the dialogue, and this causes me something like physical distress. I’m definitely not the first person this has happened to—Clint Eastwood is someone who again comes readily to mind, and Paul Newman, two fine actors whose directorial projects often worked out too. No matter what, it’s hard to take orders, especially when you think you’re smarter or more creative than the boss (which I suspect a lot of people do).

Something happened just before I left for Paris to work with Jeunet that I’m not proud of. Elise was about to finish up in Montreal and head to New York, and we were using Skype to visit with each other nightly, unless she had a late shoot, and then we’d try to talk earlier. One afternoon when I had nothing scheduled that I couldn’t postpone for another day or two, I ducked out to see a movie, a five p.m. matinee that I hoped wouldn’t have a lot of people in it, and if I timed it right, I’d be able to slip in after the previews had started and no one would notice me. It was a German movie about a man who takes a vow of silence for a year, moves out to a remote farm in Bavaria, and tries to figure out why the Holocaust happened and then write the defining book about it. When I got up after the credits rolled, a little dazed by the film’s sorrowful intelligence, I ran into someone I knew in the lobby. Seeing her there, as if conjured out of a daydream with her pretty short yellow skirt and flowing white blouse, I felt this sudden, almost sinister desire rise up from the pit of my stomach. This lovely girl was my son’s most recent ex-girlfriend, Danielle, and we hadn’t seen each other since last fall, not long before she broke up with Billy. The final time that I saw them together, I got a little drunk on champagne and kissed her good-bye right on the lips. I’m pretty sure that she and I both enjoyed it more than we should have, and I’m also pretty sure that one of the reasons I kissed her was because I was still very angry with Billy over that fucking poem he gave to Elise last fall, hardly more than a month after she and I had first gotten together.

The whole time Anna, Billy, Danielle, and I were together that night at Sylvia’s, listening to the house band blow blue notes into the electrified air, I felt sorry for Danielle, knowing what I did about my son’s behavior in New Orleans, and how it was very unlikely that she had much of a clue about what he’d been up to there. I knew that it wasn’t my place to tell her, and I didn’t, but I liked Danielle and had enjoyed seeing her the few times we’d all gotten together. She had always seemed smart and kind, a girl my son was lucky to have in his life. I can’t say that about all of his girlfriends. One of them, a rail-thin performance artist he’d dated in college, had offered me a blow job at Billy’s graduation party. Another had also offered sex in exchange for an introduction to a director I was working with at the time.

For the record, I turned them both down. But I did not turn down another offer that I should have ignored too—one made by one of my daughter’s closest friends. I did not turn around and walk away when I knew what she was about to do—she was lying by the pool in my backyard, facedown on a lounge chair, her bikini top untied. I knew before she did it that she would rise up and show me her perfect seventeen-year-old breasts. I knew that she would do it because Billy was staying at his mother’s house, and Anna had just left to pick up carryout at an Italian place five miles away. Jill sat up and gave me the kind of smile that’s impossible to misinterpret, and we went into the cabana where I sometimes took naps or changed into my swim trunks. We locked the door and lay down on the sofa beneath the windows and almost before she could pull off her bikini bottom, I had my face between her legs, tasting the chlorine on her cunt, the salty sweetness beneath it, and then she climbed on top of me and I went for it so hard that I think my teeth were bared, scarcely managing to pull out in time, even though she swore that she was on the pill. It was all over in about seven or eight minutes. She wanted to do it again, wanted to sneak over whenever I’d let her, but after a few more times, I told her that we had to stop. I didn’t want Anna to find out because I knew that she wouldn’t forgive me. I knew this in part because Isis told me, but I also knew my daughter—she has a stronger moral compass than anyone I’ve ever met. This is what I thought, in any case, until I met her married lover a couple of months after
Bourbon
’s release.

When I saw Danielle after the matinee, I didn’t behave as well as I should have then either. It was such a surprise and an almost unconscionable pleasure to see her that I didn’t want to let her go. I hadn’t made any dinner plans, and after the power of that melancholy German movie, I wasn’t ready to go home. Elise had a night shoot, and I knew she wouldn’t be expecting me to call her on Skype at eight, eleven o’clock her time. After Danielle and I hugged each other hello and she shyly kissed my cheek, I asked her out to dinner.

Her face flushed. “Do you really have time?” she said. She sounded a little breathless. I think, as early as this moment, that I had already made up my mind about what the night would hold.

“Of course. I’m free as a bird.” I laughed, a little embarrassed. “Sorry about the cliché. They slip out sometimes.”

“I saw your new film,” she said. “I think it’s just terrific. Actually, I saw it twice. It’s even better than they say. I’ve been telling everyone I know to see it.”

“Thank you, Danielle,” I said. “That means a lot. While we were working on it, I had a feeling that things would turn out all right.”

“It might be my favorite movie, ever.”

I wanted to put my arms around her again, but I didn’t. “You don’t have to say that.”

“It’s true,” she said. “It’s amazing.”

We walked out to my car, which I had parked behind the theater. I was hoping we wouldn’t be stopped by anyone asking for an autograph, but about four yards from the car, we were. I signed a paper bag from Whole Foods that a woman and her daughter presented to me, both of their faces so bashful and happy that I didn’t really feel too irritated. Danielle stood a few feet away and waited for the girl to take a picture with her phone of her mother and me and then I posed for one with her and finally we were done and I got Danielle to the car and realized that it might be better to go to my place and order in so that we didn’t have to worry about other interruptions. “If you don’t mind?” I said. “Is your car here? Do you want to follow me to my place?”

“We could go to my place too,” she said. “I only live about a mile and a half from here.”

She lived in Hollywood, just off Hollywood Boulevard, in a new building with a lot of windows, and when we got inside her apartment, I was impressed. There was no clutter anywhere, and she had spent time and money on the decor—sand-colored walls, large windows, tall lamps, a refrigerator with glass doors. I felt like I’d stumbled upon a meadow in the middle of a forest—everything had been crowded and close, then in a second, it all opened up and brightened. Another effect of her beautiful, clean place was that I no longer felt too guilty about being alone with her. I felt unencumbered and relaxed. “This looks like one of the apartments you see in those Scandinavian design catalogs,” I said.

“You really think so?” she asked, blushing. “I tried very hard with this place because it’s my job. I don’t know if you knew that I earn my living by reorganizing other people’s homes.”

I nodded. “I remember. You did a wonderful job here.”

“Thank you.”

Neither of us mentioned Billy. The entire night, neither of us said his name. I think I said “my son” or “my kids” once or twice, and Danielle probably said “him,” but we didn’t talk about Billy or their breakup directly. I didn’t mention Elise either, though Danielle probably knew that I was still seeing her. News of our relationship continued to appear in the gossip columns and entertainment magazines, and I think Danielle read some of them, because as many people in L.A. read them as anywhere else, whether they would admit it or not.

We ordered Mexican, and it was delivered after we’d already drunk a bottle of white wine. We were sitting on her leather sofa, looking out the west-facing windows, where the sun had just set. Eight stories below, the streets pulsed with traffic and possibility and the desperate energy of a million dreams not coming true fast enough. She had put on some Nina Simone and we had slipped off our shoes and she was listing toward me and I was already half hard when I leaned in and kissed her. She let out a little cry and fell against me, her arms snaking around my neck, and I knew with the libidinous, cunning certainty that lives just below good manners and good intentions that we would not stop. Her breasts are fuller than Elise’s and her hips rounder. She has a womanly body, more soft than Elise’s, but not at all fat, and when I was moving inside her there on the sofa, she came so fast that it thrilled me speechless. She was so beautiful, a true grace note of my recent life, and yes, so was Elise our first time and many times after that. That I could do what I was doing while being in love with another woman is the kind of mystery that seems to bewilder and appall so many of us, even though it happens all the time. The body acts, and the mind tries to rationalize it. Danielle is a knockout and so is Elise. There are a lot of beautiful girls in the world, and sometimes when you’re close to them, you don’t know how you’ll act.