Little Known Facts: A Novel (27 page)

Aside from a few months of thinking seriously about becoming a lawyer, and a number of business ventures since college that he had invested money and only a little time in, Will had never felt that he had been called to do anything in particular. If he were meant to be a playboy or a jet-setting dilettante, he thought that even these dubious callings would have made their appeals to him by now.

What he was most interested in doing, more than anything before, was running. Aside from the one bad day when he had ended up in the hospital, he had a knack for it. His body burned oxygen efficiently and surprised him with its endurance, and this corporeal fitness filled him with optimism and strength. He was using minimalist running shoes now too, ones that he had gradually introduced into his workouts; he had reconfigured his stride to put less stress on his joints and had read and studied books by expert runners. There were people, ordinary in most other ways, who ran hundred-mile races, people who routinely ran fifty miles in a day. Some of them looked like greyhounds, their faces lean and intense and inquiring. When he ran through the streets of Paris toward the Bois de Boulogne or in the opposite direction toward Pére Lachaise and the eastern reaches of the city, he felt that he was running toward some great happiness. This sense of well-being lasted for an hour or two after his runs, sometimes longer. While he was walking off Elise’s troubling e-mail he wished that he could run instead, but at night, it wasn’t a good idea. Many of the ancient streets were poorly lit, and if he tripped and fell, he might have injured himself badly enough that running wouldn’t be possible for weeks.

He slept until ten the morning after his snowy, lovesick wanderings. When he woke up, it felt like he was on the verge of catching a cold, but after he drank two cups of coffee and ate a croissant, he felt better. Sitting by the Brancusi head, a sculpture whose eerieness Will had seen make a small boy burst into noisy tears two days earlier, he realized how lucky he was, how lucky he’d always been. His good fortune burned in the pit of his stomach, its heat spreading upward until he felt his face turn warm. He had to stop thinking about Elise and find someone else to be with. He would reply to Elise’s e-mail and tell her that she would not be hearing from him again. That he was sorry he had been so pushy and ignored her request that he leave her alone after the day they had spent together in Santa Barbara, where he had met her for lunch and they had walked together on the beach for two hours, she letting him hold her hand and kiss her several times. He had written another poem (it was actually the fourth poem that he had written for her, but he had not sent the second and third, believing them to be terrible). He had sent this new poem to her after the one phone conversation they had had in late April, during which she had told him that he must stop trying to see her, but he sensed that she was ambivalent, that he might need only to keep trying a little longer and she would yield to his wish to see her again.

And then, at last, she had. The second poem he sent to her was a little longer than the first, and he had ended it with the final three lines from James Wright’s “A Blessing”:

Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

She had called him after receiving the poem and said that she loved it. That she remembered the Wright poem from college, and it had been one of her favorites, and how had he known this? He hadn’t, he said, but it was one of his favorites too. Then she had started crying, and he felt both guilty and gratified. It seemed that she really did care about him, that she was confused and maybe a little disoriented, but they would probably be fine. Even if his father disinherited him, he would survive, and perhaps this was what needed to happen so that he would stop sleepwalking and finally find his place and purpose in life.

“I think about you too,” she said. “I don’t mean to, but I do.”

“I want to see you, as soon as we can arrange it.”

“I’ve never done this before. I’m not lying.”

“I know you’re not.”

Four days later, seeing her in Santa Barbara, an hour and a half up the coast from L.A., where they met because they weren’t as likely to run into his father or any of his and Elise’s friends, Will felt that he couldn’t take a normal breath for several minutes. She wore a straw hat and sunglasses and did not want to be recognized because now she was being recognized all the time. If someone snapped their picture and posted it on the Web, or worse, published it in some sleazy gossip rag, “Star Steps Out with Boyfriend’s Son,” it would be catastrophic for them both. It was he who took their picture—with his phone, several photos of them together on the beach that she felt wary about letting him take because, he assumed, she worried about his father somehow getting hold of his phone and finding the photos. Or worse, Will sending them to him, trying to force her hand.

He had rented a room at an inn in Ojai, but he didn’t tell her about it in advance. When he mentioned it to her after they had been walking on the beach for a while, his desire to be alone with her close to intolerable, she had stopped suddenly and withdrawn her hand from his. “I can’t,” she said.

“Yes, you can,” he said, heart sinking.

She shook her head. “If I do, I’m going to screw everything up.”

“No, you’re not,” he said desperately. “Everything will be fine.”

“I need to go home. I’m sorry, Will, but I do.”

“If you felt like you didn’t need my dad to help you with your career, would you go with me to Ojai?”

She looked at him. “Please don’t say things like that.”

“You don’t need him. You’re famous now. You’re going to Cannes in a week, and things will just keep getting better for you.” She was going to Cannes with his father, and it made him almost sick to bring it up, but he did not know how to change her mind about Ojai. The room was actually a small villa with its own kitchen and housekeeping staff. It cost more than a thousand dollars a night, and he could not bear the thought of her not seeing it. The thought of staying there by himself was even worse.

“He’s my boyfriend, Will,” she said. “Not someone I’m using to get ahead with my career.”

“Then why did you come up here?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Because I wanted to.”

He had not been able to change her mind, even after she kissed him good-bye a final time next to her car, even after she saw that he was about to cry and had looked away. If he had been the type of person who liked romantic movies that did not end happily, he might have felt that his disappointment was almost something to cherish. But he had not particularly enjoyed
The English Patient
or
Casablanca
or
Dr. Zhivago.
He wanted the hero to get the girl and keep her. He wanted
Cinderella
and
The Princess Bride
and
Sleeping Beauty.
He wanted, he realized, a fairy tale.

Three days after the first e-mail from Elise in Paris and two days after his reply that he would not bother her anymore, she sent another message:

Dear Will,

I turned down your father’s proposal. I know that I’m not ready to get married. I’m only twenty-five, and I told your father that I think we should just keep dating for a while and see how it goes. He was disappointed, but he said that he would live with it if he had to. I didn’t tell him this, but I also think he’s been seeing someone else. Maybe it’s only my faulty sixth sense making trouble for me, but I can’t shake the feeling that he’s preoccupied by something (or someone) that has nothing at all to do with his work or Life After the Storm.

Please keep all of this between you and me. I’m sure you will, but I thought I should say it anyway. Take good care over there in France, Elise

He read the message over and over, wondering what Elise was trying to tell him, if there was a subtext at all. His parents and sister knew that he was in Paris now, and he had talked to Anna in the past week, but she had said nothing about his father proposing to Elise. She probably didn’t know and wouldn’t know unless Will told her, because he could not see their father talking to her about it if his proposal had been rejected. Elise’s refusal was enough to make him call his father; Renn had left him a voice mail four days earlier, which Will had so far ignored. Just checking in, his father had said. Hope everything’s fine.

He tried his father’s cell phones, leaving a message on both, before he reached him when he tried calling a second time. “Is everything all right?” his father asked. “You sounded a little agitated in your messages.”

“Why didn’t you call me back after you listened to them?”

“I would have, but I’m at a shoot right now. It’s only eleven thirty in the morning here. What’s it over there? Six thirty?”

“Eight thirty.”

“Oh. Well, I would have called you in a couple of hours.”

His father sounded no different than usual. He even sounded a little buoyant. Had Elise changed her mind since e-mailing him and accepted the proposal? The thought made it harder to breathe. Maybe his father had seen his mistress, if he had one, which Will assumed he did. Elise was likely to be right about this. Women often seemed to be able to tell when something was going on; his mother had known too, though she had tried, often unsuccessfully, not to bring up her suspicions in front of Anna and him while still married to their father.

“Sorry that it’s taken me a few days to get back to you. I was just wondering how you were doing.”

“I’m fine,” his father said, a wary note in his voice now. “Everything’s fine.”

“That’s good.”

They both were silent until Renn said, “I hope you’re not overdoing it with your running.”

“I’m not,” said Will. “It’s harder to get overheated in the winter anyway.”

“But you could still overdo it.”

“I could, but I don’t.”

“Have you made any friends over there yet?”

“Dad, I’ve only been here a couple of weeks.”

“What do you do all day?”

“I go for runs. I shop for food and go to museums. I’m going to start taking a French class at the American School too.”

“Any more thoughts about law school?”

Will could hear someone talking in the background, then an eruption of laughter. He knew that his father would have to go in a minute, and they had said nothing at all to each other. But he didn’t know what he had expected—his father to confess to an affair? To admit that Elise didn’t want to marry him, at least not yet? Few people he knew, especially his father, were ever forthright about these sorts of things, unless they were being filmed for a reality show or calling in to
Loveline.

“I’m still thinking about it,” said Will, “but I don’t know if I want to be a lawyer.”

“Billy,” said his father, almost soothingly. “Just try something. Take a leap and apply to Cordon Bleu if you’re planning to stay in Paris for a little while. Learn how to do magic tricks and work as a clown at kids’ parties. I don’t know. Just do something, and maybe it’ll stick.”

“Whatever I do, it’s going to be about running.”

“Running,” his father said slowly. “Running away. To Paris or Johannesburg or Riyadh or Warsaw.”

Will said nothing.

“Well, I hope you’re taking care of yourself. No girlfriend yet, I suppose.”

“No.”

“I’m sure it won’t take long.”

“What about you? Do you have a new girlfriend?”

His father hesitated. “No. I’m still with Elise.”

“Oh. Well, I guess you are.”

“What do you mean, you ‘guess’?”

“I don’t mean anything. I was just talking.”

“That’s the problem,” said his father, half under his breath. “All right. I have to run. Maybe we can talk more later.”

“Okay,” said Will. “I’ll be awake for a few more hours.”

His father did not call back that night or the next, but aside from his resenting Renn a little for his silence, it was a relief. He waited to reply to Elise’s e-mail too, not sure if he should respond at all because he had told her that he would leave her alone, and if he waited long enough, maybe she would e-mail him again. It would almost feel like he had the upper hand for an hour or two, but he wasn’t sure what that meant or what good it would do him to have it, especially considering that they were more than six thousand miles apart.

He had not been lying about the French class at the American School. He had stopped by there on one of his many long walks and signed up for a class that would meet on a Tuesday night for the first time, which was a few days after Elise’s e-mail and the phone call to his father. He did not have high hopes for the course, but when he walked through the door of the classroom and chose a seat two rows from the front and along the wall, he was pleased to see two pretty women there, one of them a student, the other their teacher, both probably not much older or younger than he was. He had not yet written Elise back. He had forced himself to wait until after the first French class, but he had spent more time than he should have staring at the printouts he had made of the photos he had taken of her during their afternoon in Santa Barbara. These were the second copies; the first he had handled so much over the past several months that they had become grimy and wrinkled.

One good thing since coming to Paris, aside from how it had cleared his head about a couple of things and made him feel less inert, was that he had gained back some more weight since he had been in the hospital. He was close to one fifty-five again, about six or seven pounds short of his normal weight. He had not intended to get as thin as he had before the October collapse, but his appetite had so often been poor, and even though he knew that he was losing too much weight and his mother was constantly harassing him about it, he had had trouble forcing himself to eat enough to make up for all of the calories he was burning. The chocolates and pastries and baguettes and croissants in Paris, along with the many good restaurants where actual French people rather than tourists ate, had restored the color to his face. An added benefit, related or not, was that he no longer seemed to be losing much hair, and the places where it was thinning did not seem to be as sparse as they had been in L.A. He wondered if he might be imagining this, but it didn’t seem like it.