True Hollywood Lies (16 page)

Finally, I got Nigel at his flat. “Louis? Dunno. The wanker got brassed off at me and stormed off,” he mumbled. After too many pints of Guinness, Nigel’s BBC elocution had been obliterated. What was left was pure Cockney.

“Why? What happened?”

“Dunno exactly. He disappeared for an hour, then came back into the pub already in his cups and whining about his father leaning on his mum again. Then when I mentioned the play I’m doing in the West End, he said something about wanting to come back to do some theater himself. I laughed and said, ‘No you won’t, not unless you cock up in America.’ That pissed him off! He said he was tired of apologizing to everyone for being a success. Then the bloody sod accused me of calling him a sellout, said I was a bloody poser, and stormed out.”

“I’m sorry, Nigel. I’m sure it was the beer talking and he didn’t mean it.”

“The hell he didn’t! Happens every time he comes home, the insecure bastard. But I guess that’s why you’re there.”

“Why? What do you mean?”

“You know, to catch him when he falls and prop him up again. Blimey, I can certainly see how that would be a full-time job. Well, better you than me. Hope it’s worth the salary he pays you. Bollocks! Sorry, must ring off. I forgot I had a rehearsal today.”

With a click, he was gone.

* * *

When Louis eventually resurfaced—some three hours later—he was hung over, cranky from lack of sleep, and grousing about the absence of any decent coffee in London. I convinced him to take a hot, steaming shower, sent a bellboy over to the nearest Starbucks for a “cuppa” anything remotely resembling his favored Jamaican Blue Mountain (for once, thanking the corporate marketing gods for their strict adherence to conformity), put Alfonse on stand-by for our imminent departure, and called British
Cosmo
to beg off the interview and photo shoot until the early evening, so that Dorian wouldn’t kill himself—or Louis—when it was time for us to leave for it.

“How unfortunate,” sniffed the editor in a tone similar to the one used in Queen Elizabeth’s infamous
annus horribilis
lament. “Monsieurs Mert and Marcus had planned on returning home to Ibiza sometime in early evening . . . but I’ll see what I can do.”

“Monsieur Trollope will be forever in your debt,” I muttered.

Louis, toweling off as he gulped down his Starbucks Grande, was within hearing distance and cracked loudly, “The
hell
I will! They should be chuffed that I even agreed to talk to their feckin’ rag—” before I could hang up.

Too late. She beat me to the punch, but not before letting out a telling
harrumph
.

“I hope you don’t regret how she writes you up.”

“When I get through charming the knickers off her, she won’t remember why she was mad at me in the first place,” he answered blithely.

But I knew better. For his own good, he needed to move beyond whatever ghosts he was seeing there in the back alleys of London, or else Louis’s London bridges would be burning all around him.

Which meant I’d have to allow him to save face. At someone else’s expense.

And I knew just who that sacrificial lamb would have to be this time around.

“I talked to Nigel—”

“
That
wanker? What did he have to say?”

“He. . . apologized.”

“Really?” Louis narrowed his eyes into wary slits.

“Yes. He was worried that you might have taken something the wrong way. He didn’t say what it was about; just that he hoped it would blow over.”

Louis nodded grudgingly. “I’ll have to think about it. To be honest, I’m tired of listening to him beg me for help with his career. There is no way he’d make it in America. They’d eat him alive.”

Sighing from exhaustion, he made his way back toward the bedroom to get dressed. As he passed his reflection in the foyer mirror, Louis stopped and scrutinized it. “I really do need to clean house; you know, clear out the bad karma and all that other California New Age bullshit. I
do
believe in that crap, you know.”

Placing his thumb and middle finger over a frown line on his forehead, he spread it smooth. “Sadly, Mick’s another one who’s been leaning on me too heavily. I guess I should have dropped him a long time ago, too.”

Catching my incredulous stare in the mirror, he added slyly, “But keep mum on that one, okay, love? It’s what I pay you for, right?”

His eyes swept over me slowly, as if appraising my worth, too.

Then he shrugged and walked on.

So much for my role in Louis’s life. Or anyone else’s role, either, for that matter.

* * *

“It’s a wrap!” A relieved Dorian declared, in perfectly understandable English.

“Simply
adorable!
” the British
Cosmopolitan
editor gushed, after being charmed out of her Jimmy Choos by Louis, and, thankfully, not her knickers.

“Stunning!” her photo editor murmured upon viewing Mert and Marcus’ Polaroids of Louis, in profile, sans shirt, but with that devilish smile of his intact.

I too smiled, more wanly perhaps, but no less mischievously. For I had found the key to keeping Louis happy:

Just let him do whatever he wanted.

And medicate frequently. Not him;
myself.

Personally, I would start that night. Because all of his appointments had miraculously wrapped up ahead of schedule, Louis insisted that we both take the night off, so that we could be rested before the late-morning flight back the next day.

“Sounds good to me,” I answered, yawning widely. “I think I’ll just turn in.”

Not.
If I dumped him now, I could make it over to the National Gallery. Luckily for me, this was the one night in which the gallery stayed open until nine, and now more than ever I wanted to see Botticelli’s
Venus and Mars.
I needed a touchstone to my old life, and art and astronomy are eternally intertwined.

As, apparently, were Venus’s unwieldy ringlets and my own.

Afterwards I’d hit a bar.

“That was my thought, exactly.” Louis smiled innocently. “See you in the morning.”

For Louis, things worked out as planned: he did see me in the morning.

I, on the other hand, caught a glimpse of him a mere hour later, in, of all places, the National Gallery. There, where no cameras were allowed, in an alcove ignored by a public disinterested in Nicolaes Maes’
A Woman Scraping Turnips
, Louis, kissed, cuddled, scolded, then passionately kissed again a very sad, very haunted sweet-looking woman about my age:

Samantha.

I knew this because, even
sotto voce
, his theatrically trained voice couldn’t help but throw out her name while it denied her the love she begged for.

I was mesmerized by their pantomime for almost half an hour. Finally, as he cradled her, bowed and sobbing, in his arms and stroked her hair, I stumbled out from behind the statuette where I’d been hiding, and headed for the front doors.

On my way out, a guard nodded sympathetically, apparently under the impression that I had been moved by all I’d seen.

He was
so
right: What had aroused me was the care and emotion I now knew Louis was capable of showing someone he had obviously loved at one time.

Or else he was one hell of an actor, which is why I dared not fall in love with him.

So, why
was
I still attracted to him?

Chapter 9: Perihelion


The point in its orbit when an object is closest to the Sun.

Despite being born and raised in California, I have personally never bought into much of my homeland’s conventional wisdom.

For example, I do believe that it is possible to grow old gracefully without the need to shoot collagen, silicone, saline, urine, animal placentas, bacteria or other alien organisms into my face, forehead, ass or chest.

And I don’t buy into the theory that death is optional;

Or that a shrink is as much a necessary evil in your life as a cell phone.

And while I’m enough of a visionary to accept the logic behind the how and why of celestial bodies following predetermined orbits, I truly cannot believe that our futures are determined by anything other than the conscious decisions we make.

Then again, if I’d ever reconsidered hiring a shrink, maybe I would have realized that working for Louis was the most irrational, illogical, and deeply disturbed thing I could have done at that point in my life.

Instead I ignored any hints the universe threw at me that staying within Louis’s orbit would be just as bumpy a ride as the one I had taken with Leo, and prayed that Jasper would recover my inheritance soon.

Very, very soon.

“Just hang in there, kiddo,” Jasper counseled. “Something may break any day now.”

If my lawsuit had been a script, you could say that it was stuck in Development Hell.

Until my golden parachute opened, I’d have to keep Louis’s childish, erratic, egotistical demands from driving me crazy.

Right then and there, I realized that the only way to keep my sanity was to convince myself that Louis was nothing more than an employer with the desire to be happy, healthy and successful in his professional endeavors.

With that in mind, my mission was easy: help him achieve these goals.

In other words,
become
the perfect personal assistant
: efficient, creative and indispensable—

And totally immune to any of Louis’s charms.

For three months, no task was too great or small, the latter of which included making sure Louis wouldn’t want for any creature comforts, including the latest and greatest Humvee from the dealership—which he made me exchange twice, just because “the seat doesn’t adjust just right, love. See what they can do about it. That’s my girl”; the multitude of freebees (Las Vegas hotel and resort stays; or couturier, and other luxury items) in return for Louis’s nonchalantly-made endorsements; and a kitchen stocked with his favorite foods (both on and off Zone).

However, some of my more trying tasks included juggling his appointments with:

Candida Sage, the diva acting coach who charged Louis outrageous sums to verbally taunt him for having “the emotional memory of a Neanderthal,” after which she would cradle him to her ample, sagging bosom when he broke down in fear that she was right, and he was in fact an acting fraud;

Daniela Cross, his anorexic nutritionist, whom I caught upchucking in the guest bathroom after she’d stuffed a box of Zone cookies down her throat;

Max Banks, the lascivious chiropractor, who had Louis convinced that watching porn was a great muscle relaxant. I guess the fact that his shop backed up to a Triple-XXX video store should have been the obvious giveaway that he had a side business more lucrative than back cracking;

Billie Buck, Louis’s closeted personal trainer, who tenderly spotted Louis’s bench presses but pouted jealously every time Louis went into the lurid details of his female conquests the night before;

and “Dr. Manny” Manolo Lipschitz, celebrated quack therapist to the stars, who took full advantage of Louis’s insecurities as an actor as well as his anger at his father, by encouraging him to pass along his hurt to others—lovingly, of course, then giving Louis “permission” to forgive himself for his subsequent bad boy behavior.

Worse yet, Dr. Manny actually had the audacity to ask me to grind up Valium and put it in Louis’s coffee before he filmed his scenes.

“That should calm him down, relieve his performance anxiety,” Dr. Manny lisped, spraying both me and the lapels of his Kenneth Cole suede shirt with a fine film of saliva.

“But won’t he pass out?”

“Nah. Brando never did. Although it did make him a bit paranoid afterward. I’ll leave you some restraints, too, just in case.”

I passed on both recommendations.

And, finally, I was also in charge of supervising Lourdes, Louis’s Mexican maid (whom Louis accused of stealing from his Zone pantry, when in fact it was his upchucking nutritionist who was swiping the food he’d just paid her for), and the Guatemalan gardening crew (who, unaware that I understood Spanish, had numerous interesting and somewhat convincing discussions as to whether Louis was in fact a pimp, based on the number of half-naked women who traipsed in and out of the house while they were there).

I also extricated Louis from the many ludicrous commitments he made to those who somehow broke through the front line of Team Louis—Monique, Genevieve and Randy.

And I quickly learned how to shoo away Louis’s posse when they wanted him to come out and play while he was supposed to be studying a script or getting some rest in order to make it onto the set in one piece the next morning.

I also became adept at playing Russian Roulette—Louis’s shorthand for lying to Tatiana—without stuttering from guilt. As Louis explained it, the truth only got her upset at him, which in turn got him upset with
me
. Still, no matter what time zone she called from, she instinctively timed her calls while he was cruising Sunset with his buddies—or with some fawning beauty he’d picked up. The upshot of our deceptions was that I got a great handle on both Russian and French curse words.

I could honestly say he appreciated my role in his life: the gatekeeper. But believe me, it wasn’t always easy keeping the stallion in his paddock—even when he knew staying in there was for his own good.

What about me, you ask? Had I figured out how to take some time off from the Louis Looney Bin? Well, to be honest, if I was lucky, that happened one night a week: When I knew Louis was out playing with the Posse, I’d go out and look at the stars—the
real
ones.

Usually I did this with Mick.

Then we’d go back to my place and indulge in the tenderest sex I’d ever had.

With
my phones turned off.

Was Louis aware of our rendezvous? I had no doubt about this, although I know he never heard about it from either Mick or me. Still, it was evident in the little jibes he took at me (“You look a bit peaked, Hannah. Had a fitful night? Perhaps you’d prefer sleeping over here . . . in the cabana, of course . . . ”) and in the way he taunted Mick in my presence. (“Ran into that piece of ass you once used and abused—what was her name? Sherry? Cheri? Cherry? That was it! The virgin, right? What, that
wasn’t
her name? Well, for that matter, she wasn’t a virgin either, was she?”)