Lunch (6 page)

“But now,” she adds, “it's ‘Here, smile for the camera. Look, it's a Polaroid.' Instant gratification. I get so exasperated. In case you hadn't noticed.” She grimaces. “Put it on film. Watch it. Watch it again.”

Nick turns his head to look at me.

“Don't move,” says Olivia.

“Sorry.”

“Actors,” she says, gently mocking.

“I thought you didn't know who I was.”

“I didn't really, but I do now. Besides, I have painted a few of you before, usually against my better judgment.”

“And here I was just beginning to think you liked me.” He can risk the glib lines, the pleasure of this easy banter loosening his limbs, tripping his tongue as he would have it trip over Olivia's breasts.

She is smiling. “You, all those actors, all that idiot Hollywood bullshit, how can you stand it? It's such useless energy, all that gossip and dealmaking and my car is bigger and my parking space is closer. What an utter waste of time.” She steps back again, coolly regarding. “All I know is that everyone out there drove Olivier nuts, when he was working on Jamie's film. All that energy sucked out of him for no reason except to stroke someone's misguided self-­importance.” Her eyes narrow in concentration. “You, all of you precious stars, you're what painters used to be. Important.” She sighs. “We mean nothing save to the very few who choose to seek us out.”

“I'll tell everybody I know to buy your art.”

“Please don't. I can't think of anything more revolting than a bunch of so-­called superstars begging me to be immortalized.”

“Excuse me, your royal highness,” Nick says, mockingly pompous. “I suppose I should kiss your feet in grateful appreciation.”

“Well, I am too harsh,” she says, shrugging away a smile. “I don't want fame, or adulation, or the public panting to examine my dirty laundry. I'm lucky I'm successful, that I can choose who I paint. That's very rare. Most of my friends, artists I know from school, certainly can't. But choosing my subjects is the only control I have, really. I'm only doing you so you'll get off my case and leave me alone.” She stops, steps back, steps forward, concentrating. “And because . . .”

“Because what?” Nick says. He is too eager.

“I don't know,” Olivia says. “Never mind.”

It is the first time she is really letting herself relax into a true look at him, not as a subject she knows she needs to paint, not as a curiosity, but as a man. He feels the heat of her gaze, he grasps it instantly as if he were starving, the potency of his presence is palpable, inescapable. The air is suddenly thick with the surprising fog of unspoken wishes.

“Painting a portrait is a little bit like working very hard on a courtship,” she says, she must speak, she cannot bear the weight of his eyes upon her, she turns back to the solid ground of her work, her eyes hooded. “It's so intimate, and so revealing. When it's finished and they see it, see themselves for the very first time, it's like the moment of your courtship when you declare your love for each other. Either they don't like it, or are bewildered by your vision of them and your hopes are dashed, usually because you can't fulfill their expectations. Often, with my work, they simply don't understand the setting I've put them in. Or, if they do like it, you're swept right into their arms.” Her eyes on Nick. “Metaphorically speaking, of course.”

“Of course,” he says.

“Other painters say that a portrait is no good unless the sitter likes it,” she goes on, “although that's not always true for me. What I hope is that, perhaps, someone, someday, will be able to read a deeper meaning into what I do. That they will find a sort of—­oh I don't know, this sounds so ­pompous—­a sort of profundity, maybe one that is even unintended, and it will move them. Shake them. And if that happens, I will have given a stranger an unexpected gift of seeing another reality, if only for a second.”

“But doesn't that happen every time?”

“Are you kidding? Of course not. I'm always telling myself that each one is the last one.”

“But you seem so, I don't know, confident. Capable. Fluid. Sure of yourself.” Long pause. Long pregnant pause. “Sure of what you want, and who you want it with.” Another pause. “And who you want it for.”

She stops. Even from where I sit I can see a flicker of panic light up her eyes and her shoulders tense. “Why do you say that?”

Nick shrugs.

“Well,” she says, attacking the canvas once more, “you don't see what I do every day before I start.” She smiles ruefully. “I am the world's worst procrastinator.”

Nick is surprised. “You? I don't believe it.”

“Believe it. Every time I wake up I wonder how much courage I'll find that day. That I will have lost my instincts in the night, that even when I start this will be the last one, the Bobby Fischer of my paintings.”

“But even he came out of retirement,” Nick says.

“I know,” she says with a rueful grin. “Still, I'll look at the light and say it's no good, it won't do. I'll look at the mail and say there are too many bills to pay, oh right, I'd better read this magazine, I might get inspired. I'll look at my hair and say it needs a wash. I'll look at my shoes and say the heels are worn down and I must go get them fixed. I'll look at the pile of nice clean canvases waiting to be painted and say I need to prime another, it takes six weeks, and I'm not ready. I feel my little jars of pigments and tubes of paint behind me, I feel them boring into the back of my head saying take me, touch me, use me. Usually that's when I can start. I don't know.” She shakes her head. “What am I talking about?”

She was not talking to Nick, to me, she was talking to herself, she doesn't even hear it. Her charcoal stick dances wildly, she is moving, shifting, she looks at Nick, she looks at the canvas, she looks up at the sky, her eyes narrow in concentration. She is talking to keep her mind free for what she is drawing, she is talking because she needs to, because if she does, Nick cannot talk back. He cannot say what he is feeling, so surprised is he to be feeling it, he cannot tell Olivia that she is looking at someone without realizing that what she sees is a sham shadow of his real self, appearances are so deceiving. He cannot say that she might think she can figure out what fearsome insecurities and cravings fuel his life—­and they are there, little butterflies of apprehension hovering over the opened flowers of his ego: Can he do it, is he slipping, do they love me, will I always be a star—­but she will never truly know what machinations churn ceaselessly in his mind.

He cannot say he is transfixed by her odd beauty, mesmerized by her words and her seeming confidence in the telling of them so openly, aching to tear himself away from the pillar against which he lounges, appearing so cool and relaxed, and grab her in his arms, throw her on the work table, on her fat tubes of paint, crush her down on them, their weight squeezing the tubes till they burst, the colors running together, on the table, staining their clothes, he taking her, not just her body but everything that makes her, she cannot escape the firmness of his grasp, he will not let her go, her back a riot of colors, flowing together.

It is a painting of their own frenzied creation, born of his insatiable desire.

I am sitting in the corner, watching them, unnoticed.

If she keeps talking she cannot listen to the thoughts running through her mind as wildly as her charcoals and brushes scream across the canvas, she cannot touch what she does not want to be feeling, this inexorable response to the primitive raw hunger that scares her so. She feels him, she sucks it in and transfers it in a wild passion, the fire of him is engulfing her arm and the fingers clamped around her charcoal stick, his potency is driving her brushes, forcing her paint this way, and not that, moving her feet in a fervent blaze across the sprung floor.

She sighs. Her hands drop to her side. “Sorry,” she says. “I need to take a break. Do you want some tea or a drink or something?”

I know why she has stopped. She is wavering. It is exhausting, fighting him.

She covers the portrait and moves over to the end of her work table, the dirty end she calls it, where all the mess of painting is contained in grime-­encrusted tins and soup cans and bottles and bits and pieces, broken-­down brushes, rags for wiping, screws and nails in glass baby-­food jars, palette knives and razor blades, little tokens from friends, a shaky snowstorm with the Statue of Liberty in it. She fusses with the kettle, running her fingers through her hair. Nick stretches, a languid feral thing. I join him. He is patient. He is supremely patient. He is lurking in the high grass of the savannah, waiting, awaiting the precisely perfect moment before he will pounce.

We sit at the table of the hyacinths. Olivia brings a plate of cookies and a fat pot of tea, she pours it, we drink, she sits down, rolling her shoulders back and forth to relieve the strain making them taut with tension.

“Sorry,” she says again, picking at crumbs. “You're here for such a short amount of time. I don't usually need to stop. I don't want to stop.” She yawns.

“Should I be flattered that I'm wearing you out?” Nick asks.

“Go ahead,” she says, smiling back. “I'm sure flattery is as necessary to you as eating.”

“Touché,”
he says good-­naturedly. She is relaxing, slowly, she thinks she can trust him not to be anything other than a sitter for a portrait, she is not pulling away, he is going to bide his time, he is going to wait as long as he has to, he is going to have her, she cannot repel this strength, he is too secure.

“We'll come back,” he says.

We came back.

 

Chapter 5

N
ick had laughed the first time he saw the motorcycle messengers in London, leather-­clad clones, hunched over their bikes in thick black overalls and chunky black gloves, with stiff, scuffed knee-­high boots and opaque black helmets hiding any trace of their own identity as they went weaving, fearlessly speeding, in and out of traffic on rain-­slicked streets.

Darth Vaders on a Harley, he called them, sending me out to buy twin sets of gear far too heavy for the balmy evenings of riding in the Hollywood Hills but perfect disguise for quick rides during stolen moments on the set in London, Nick zooming off to clear his head, leaving a coughing furor in his wake, makeup and wardrobe and Jamie and the insurers screaming at him to come back, the bastard, and then screaming at me to get on my own bike and find him.

It was on one of the bikes that he sent me out to find the flat.

It would not be easy, because we have very particular requirements. Absolute privacy in an empty building. Up-­to-­date wiring, for lighting that would be discreet yet high enough to record. Walls thick enough to muffle noise, although not too thick to drill a hole wide enough for the lens of a camera.

It would not be easy because my presence is off-­putting, especially to London real estate agents, and so I asked the girls in makeup to smooth some sort of putty on my face to make my scars less noticeable, not only so that I'd appear to be a proper American businessman, complete with bogus letterhead and impeccably bogus credentials thanks to the production assistants, but to protect Nick's identity, as many in town had already seen us together, and he wanted no one to know where this flat, the solemn embodiment of his desire, would be.

None of these elaborate precautions mattered much in the end, really, although they diverted me from the daily chores and pleased Nick and kept him humming, and also pleased the crew, flattered beyond all reckoning to be privy to my secret mission, anything to help their superstar keep his sanity during the grueling months ahead, away from the girls standing shivering outside the Savoy, away from prying eyes, safe and cozy in his little hidey-­hole, wherever it might be, the poor chap. None of it mattered, because money makes the most succinct dialogue, and the large quantity of loose pound notes I had packed in my briefcase made all negotiations a mere formality, just in case.

On days when Nick would be working too hard to need me I'd get on the bike in my messenger gear, and cruise slowly, perusing the real estate agents' signs. You'll know it when you find it, Nick said to me, it'll just be there, and you'll know.

I am riding slowly, mindlessly, content, icy wind whistling under the visor of my helmet, lost in curving streets with ever-­changing names, past neat squares of prim brick row houses, indistinguishable save for the colors of their doors and the patterns on the shabby lace in the windows, past concrete blocks of council flats and the sordid smallness of High Street shops, bored teenagers lingering outside, smoking idly, or cramming french fries into their fat faces, a film of grease on their lips. Past the red Victorians behind Harrods, the color of dust in the desert at sunset, past solid white Edwardians, imposing order on smooth crescent streets, so unlike the bungalows and their parched cropped lawns in Los Angeles. There are no lawns in London, not where I am riding, only paved concrete terraces and pots of frozen geraniums.

I find the building one dark afternoon, just off Queensway. It was the name that attracted me at first, nearly straight across Kensington Gardens from Olivia's studio in Queens Gate Mews, a silly coincidence that Nick would certainly see as symbolic. I find it around the corner from the Porchester Baths, the large
FOR REN
T OR SALE
sign flapping, forlorn, and I remembered one of the grips talking about the baths, the steam rooms and the sauna, the shivering quick descent into the plunge pool, a massage in the heat of comfortable nakedness, to sit, sated, in the billows of mist, tangled thoughts and stress made liquid, melting into an unstoppable stream of sweat, at least for the moment.

The houses are four-­storied and white, all the same, their pillars round and smooth like Olivia's arms, like Olivia's thighs, smooth and gleaming. The rows of these houses hug a curve in the road, all the same, only their numbers are different, Gloucester Terrace on one side, Porchester Square on the other.

Nick will be safe here. No one would ever think to look for him in this neighborhood, polyglot nationalities hurrying to do their shopping, arms laden with paper sacks from the Arab grocers, heads bent against the rain, drooping. It is wet, it is dark, movie stars do not belong here, with bags of shopping, or waiting in interminable lines for the bus to take them to work on the other side of the city. No one will ever notice us, a biker on an errand, a station wagon dropping off a passenger with a hat pulled low, and a woman walking with swift purpose, her hair hidden beneath a vibrantly colored shawl, hands thrust deep into her pockets, lost in thought.

Only the white of the pillars gleams, ghostly white in the dark, beckoning.

The real estate agent shows me the house, repressed eagerness giving a slight twitch to his right eye. His glasses need cleaning. “A diplomat's house,” he says, “very well maintained, recently redecorated to a high standard, as you must see, oh yes, all the very best indeed.”

“Who lives here?” I ask him.

“No one, as yet,” he says, his eyes sliding away, “although we've had quite extraordinary interest. There are only five flats in it, one on each floor save the second, as I'll show you.” He points to a large door just off the staircase, and then a more modest one down the hall. “The previous owner wished to have a
pied à terre
here, and so he created this cozy flat. It's only one room, with a very small kitchen area and bath, but quite comfortable.”

For his assignations, no doubt. “Docs it connect to the other flat?”

“Oh no, sir. Not in the slightest.”

He takes me into the larger flat first, opening into a lovely square room, the ceilings high, their moldings elaborately carved, the parquet floor polished amber, a kitchen off a narrow hall with sleek cupboards and a gray-­green slate floor, the tub in the bathroom so long and deep even I could stretch out in it without bending my knees. But what cinched it was the small flat next door, compact, just big enough for what I needed to install in it, and myself. As if some unknown soul had designed it strictly for Nick's purpose.

Nick will be very happy.

I rent the entire building, cash up front for six months with an option to renew, although Nick's shoot will not go quite that long. The agent is ecstatically obsequious, especially after I slip him one thousand pounds and tell him we expect no problems and want to be left quite alone, thank you very much.

Nick and I go through the phone book one dreary afternoon, finding names to attach to the other buzzers to trick any visitors into thinking all the flats are occupied. Security, I tell the agent, who quickly attaches the names. Alderson, Andrews, Fairley, and Scott. The space next to Flat 2 says that only, #2. That's how Nick wants it. No name. No indication of what awaits, a gilded wonderland, inside.

W
HEN
I
am through, it is a beautiful room. I have struggled around the clock, freed by Nick from his demands for this more pressing matter, one that must be finished, created and embellished, before his portrait is. I hire only the best, dispensing thousands and thousands for the finest technicians and workmen, none knowing what the other is doing, their silence necessary, bought with large palmed payments, a momentary flash of greed flickering into their eyes and as quickly out, replaced by the terror only my reptilian smile could evoke. Even the maid is scared of me, the slender Dominican who says her name is Dulcie, and little else. She comes early in the morning, twice a week as I have asked, and I am always waiting, because I would never give her a key. I sit in the kitchen, reading, while she cleans the large room and the bathroom in silence, efficient, for there is little to do, and then trade places. Do not ever touch the mirrors, I have told her, I will do them myself, and she is obedient. When she is slipping on her coat I always give her two fifty-­pound notes, which is far too much, and she nods her head and scurries off, slipping into the street below.

It is a room of enchantment, all gold and wood and cream, deceptively simple. I am proud of my handiwork, and the lovely things I have found, though not their purpose. It is meant to be a haven, latent with dreams, luxuriously calm, waiting expectant, so Olivia will never find out the worst of the secrets it is hiding.

When she first walks in she will see only the curved vase of Murano glass, wrought of red and golden hues so opalescent, as if the essence of Oliv­ia's hair had been captured between the artist's unknowing lips and blown with serene delicacy into tangible glowing life, filled with peonies that I change as soon as they start drooping, more arriving at extravagant expense to the Savoy every other day from a hothouse in Holland. It sits atop a round mahogany table with lions' heads for feet, and the two Regency chairs, upholstered in brocade, beside it. And then she will see the bed, the immensity of it, the fat creamy-­colored comforter atop it scattered with dozens of soft, small down pillows, begging to be sunk into, and not that the bedposts are shaped into such graceful slender columns with the sculptured golden rings at the top and bottom, for she is not Nick, and does not share his impulses, and cannot imagine what might be attached to them in a frenzy of lust.

She will see the neatly folded, crisply ironed Irish linen and plump Turkish towels stacked in the vintage Vuitton trunk at the foot of the bed, and not the assortment of Nick's custom-­ordered toys and necessary objects, boxes of nasty surprises, hidden beneath a false bottom. She will toss off her shoes on the deeply piled carpet, remarking on its thick comfort, thumbing through the CDs near the small portable player, the piles of books and scripts strewn on it, not realizing how well this carpet muffles sound that might carry to the neighbors downstairs, although of course there are no neighbors, and no one will hear anything outside this room except me. She will admire the pale shimmering brocade of the heavy draperies, matching the chairs, caught back with several silken cords, cream and gold and silver, looping yards of braided cords backed with velvet, not knowing Nick prefers them above all other cords, because they do not chafe on sensitive wrists. She will hear the calm ticking of the ormolu clock on the pink marble mantel, the framed photograph of a Mapplethorpe lily above it, and regard her pale startled face in one of the two mirrors with their baroque filigree frames, flanking the fireplace, thinking she has stepped into a dream.

She cannot know how discreetly these mirrors hide the elaborate video equipment I have set up, cameras activated by a light switch, hidden in the dimmer, that can record even in candlelight. It is my own private network, just on the other side of their room, in the neighboring apartment, that quite comfortable small room just large enough for me to sit in an overstuffed chair and observe Nick's activities in case he should go out of focus, that quite comfortable small room where I will sit, silently watching. Nick knowing, of course, that I am watching. He is not one to miss a moment.

He always needs an audience.