Misery Loves Cabernet (23 page)

My final calls were to my girls: Dawn and Kate. I told them both what happened. Both immediately cancelled their plans for the evening to pick me up, bring me out for Thai food, then languish around my home to join me for a self-pity night.

And for that, I worship them.

The next morning, my iPhone is beeping a text message:

You don’t need to pick me up this morning. Had to go to my dressing room early to meet my interior designer. Wait until you see it! It’s going to be magical!

Love,

Drew

Let’s hope that when he says magical, he doesn’t mean the room will be swamped with white rabbits.

I look at the clock. It’s only six o’clock in the morning. I decide I should get ten minutes to myself before I call my boss. It’s getting cold in the mornings here, so I put on a robe, putter down to my kitchen, brew up a pot of Starbucks Winter Blend, and check my e-mail from my office computer.

Okay, yes, I was also checking to see if Jordan had written.

He hadn’t.

I do get Jamie’s latest article, which I pore over, hoping for some inside information about men.

To: AngelCharlie

From: CalienteJamie

 

What do you think of this?

Things You Girls Should Know About Us Guys: And No, The First Answer Is Not “Be a Little More Adventurous in the Bedroom”

 

Do you want to know the biggest lie men tell? It isn’t, “I want two kids: a boy and a girl,” or “I really like your mother.” Nope, the biggest lie men tell is, “I really like your shoes.” No man really cares about a woman’s shoes. A man may love to see you in five-inch heels, but we really have no idea if you spent five hundred dollars on them at the Beverly Center, or twenty dollars at the stripper shoe store on Sunset.

Here are some other things you might not know about men:

 

1. When we ask you how your day was, we want you to answer in three sentences or less. And we certainly don’t want to know how your friend’s day was. Seriously—the game is on in two minutes.

2. When you ask us, “What are you thinking about?” try to remember that once every forty-four seconds, we are thinking about sex. So, the odds are not in our favor here that we’re going to look good in front of you when you ask that question.

3. We want to know how much you spent on clothes this month about as much as you want to know how much we spent on lap dances the last time we were in Vegas.

4. We do not notice if you gain five pounds. We very much notice if you gain fifty. But seriously, men do not notice bodies as much as women think they do. What we notice is if you’re confident, and happy with yourself, and at ease around us.

5. On the subject of fifty pounds: If you’re going on a diet, fine. But don’t talk about it all the time.

6. We don’t send mixed signals. If you say, “How about Chinese food tonight?” and we say “Fine,” we mean “Fine.” So you can stop giving us ten more meal options.

7. Most of us truly suck at the romantic gesture. Those that don’t are not to be trusted.

8. We really don’t want to take the
Cosmo
quiz. If it’s important to you, we will, but just know that in the back of our minds it’s just to kill time before we can have sex with you again.

9. We have female friends. Ignore
When Harry Met Sally
: we don’t want to sleep with all of our female friends. As a matter of fact, we chose the women we wanted as friends specifically because we didn’t want them sexually.

10. We really don’t like
Sex and the City
. Sarah Jessica Parker scares us.

11. We would like to see you wear more than once the lingerie you bought. Frankly, we’d like to see you walk around the house in it all the time.

12. Be a little more adventurous in the bedroom.

Before I can write back to argue point six, I get a call on my iPhone. I check the caller ID. It’s Whitney, from the movie. I pick up anyway. “Hello?”

“Good morning, Charlie. This is Whitney. I’m afraid we have a bit of a situation here.”

Ten minutes later, I am parking in the driveway of Liam’s Victorian house, ready to avert a crisis. I am dressed in jeans for the day, I haven’t showered, and I have on no makeup. While this is the last way in the world I want Liam to see me, I have no choice.

My boss has gone mad.

I toss my keys over to the PA organizing the cars, and run into the house. I race through the kitchen bustling with the day’s catering staff, through the chaos of the dining room turned production office, past the living room (now transformed into a sleek vision of glass and chrome for the eighties scenes), and up the stairs. Once up the stairs I make a left, then a quick right, open the door to Drew’s dressing room/Liam’s bedroom . . .

And am immediately smacked in the face with a snowball.

Yes, a snowball. In the middle of someone’s house. In the middle of Los Angeles. In the middle of November.

“Sorry,” Drew says cheerfully. “Coats are to your right. Come on in and close the door.”

I shiver as I walk into Drew’s newly decorated dressing room, and close the door behind me. It’s fucking freezing in here—and I mean freezing. Like below thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit, zero degrees Celsius. I look to my right, where Drew has set up several full length fur coats, muffs, scarves, and gloves.

“What on earth have you done?” I ask. “It must be fifteen degrees in here.”

“Actually, it’s twenty-eight,” Drew corrects me. “I couldn’t get the extra generator I brought in to bring the temperature any lower, and Whitney says we can’t have two extra generators on the set without blowing out Liam’s wiring, so we’re just going to have to make do.”

Whitney, fully decked out in fur to resemble Lara in
Dr. Zhivago
, walks up to me and whispers, “If Liam sees this, he’s going to blow a totally different kind of fuse. Do something.”

I rub my arms with my hands quickly as I say sweetly, “Drew, can I see you in the hall for a minute?”

“No. It’s hot out there. Throw on a coat, and have a seat.”

He motions to a chair that looks like a small block of ice atop a larger block of ice.

“Is that real ice?” I ask him.

“Nah, it’s fake. All of the fur is fake, too, not to mention biodegradable. I don’t want to get spray-painted again.”

Whitney looks aghast. “Someone spray-painted you for wearing fur?!”

“No, not for that.” Drew and I admit in unison.

At this point, Liam walks in. “Oh, good Lord,” he says, trying to suppress his shock. “What have you done to my bedroom?”

“Isn’t it awe-inspiring?” Drew asks gleefully. “It’s Paris at Christmas! Can you believe I got my interior designer to put this all together on twelve hours’ notice?”

At this point, snow flurries silently descend upon us. “Where is that coming from?” Liam asks, covering his alarm as he looks around his bedroom.

“Ice machine, attached to a snow-cone machine, attached to a windblower,” Drew says, his face beaming. “I know what you’re thinking: the wiring in this house is too old to hook up all my stuff on. That’s why I have an electrician upgrading everything as we speak. Oh, and I had an extra generator brought in.”

Liam puts on a pair of leather gloves as he says, “So I can hear. Drew we need to talk. When I said you could decorate my bedroom however you wished for the duration of the shoot, I was under the impression you were going to bring in glass boxes with fake necklaces and such. I thought we discussed
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
.”

“Well, yeah,” Drew admits, his tone of voice creeping up a notch. “But suddenly that struck me as mundane. I mean, anyone can turn a bedroom into a department store. How many people can turn one into a snowstorm? Charlie, your lips are turning blue. Put on a coat.”

I haven’t come up with a plan of attack yet, so I slink over to the coats, and grab a fake dark-brown mink with a matching fake mink muff.

Liam walks over to inspect his closet. “Where are all my clothes?” he asks, surprisingly without a hint of anger. As though it’s just a nonjudgmental question, you know, just curious, what happened to all my stuff?

“I had it moved to wardrobe. I need that room for my meditation.”

Whitney’s phone rings. She answers. “This is Whitney.” She listens for a moment. “Okay, I’m coming down.” She hangs up, then says to Liam, “Apparently craft services tapped into the same circuit as Drew’s AC, and blew all the power out on the ground floor. I’ll be right back.”

She takes off her fake fur, throws it to me, and walks out. As I put the fur coat back on the coatrack, Liam tries to reason with my boss. As Drew happily strings some white lights around a window, Liam tries another approach. “Drew, although this is . . . absolutely breathtaking, I don’t think you’ve worked out all of the logistics.”

“Don’t you think white lights are festive?” Drew asks.

“Incredibly celebratory,” Liam assures him before returning to his point. “For example, where am I going to sleep at night if my bedroom is twenty-two degrees? I mean,” he tries for a lighthearted joke, “I left Europe for a reason.”

Drew hands him a fake sequined snowman. “That’s right! You’re from Europe! What do you think of this? Do they have fake snowmen like this in Paris?”

Liam closes his eyes, and shakes the cobwebs from his head. “About my bedroom . . .”

“Not a problem. Charlie lives a few miles from here, and she has a wonderful guest room. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind you staying with her, just until the shoot is over. Charlie, have Liam’s clothes moved from wardrobe to your house. Your guest room has a big closet, right?”

I’m too stunned at that suggestion to speak. Liam on the other hand, is starting to lose it. “Don’t you think that would be putting her out a bit?” he asks Drew.

“I pay to put her out a bit.”

“I’m sorry,” I say to Liam. “Can I have a minute with Drew?”

“Go check out what we’ve done in the bathroom!” Drew says proudly to Liam.

I can hear Liam suppress a sigh as he leaves us. The moment he is out of earshot I whisper to Drew, “What the hell are you doing?”

“Getting you a comforter,” Drew says like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

“A what?”

“A comforter. You know, like, a guy who can comfort you, help you get over Jordan. What better way to get a guy in your bed than to actually own the bed?”

Oh, for God’s sake.

“Drew, I don’t think I’m ready to jump right back into dating right now. But, even if I was, I’m pretty sure the way to attract a guy does not include letting him see me brush my teeth in the morning, or wash out my underwear in the sink.”

I hear Liam yell, “Shit!” Followed by a thud. Followed by Liam yelling, “Fuckity-fuck, fuck, fuck!”

Actually, he’s Irish, so it sounds more like, “Feckity-feck, feck, feck.”

I run into the bathroom to find Liam flat on his back. “What happened?”

Liam sits up. “Somehow, my bathroom flooded, and due to Drew’s bedroom fantasy, the flood froze into a sheet of ice.”

Drew walks into the doorway. “You like it? I had the room turned into an ice rink. Kind of like the outdoor one I saw in Paris a few years ago.”

I happen to look in the toilet. “The toilet water is completely frozen,” I tell Drew. “Was that your intention?”

“No, but there are no mistakes in art,” Drew reasons.

I offer my hand to Liam, who takes it to help himself stand up. He sighs, then walks out of the bathroom. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to put my foot down here,” Liam says to Drew patiently, but sternly. “You cannot have a winter wonderland in the middle of my bedroom.”

It’s kind of cute, really, the way people try to stand up for themselves around Drew, and think they can get away with it.

Drew and Liam engage in a mild staring contest before Drew says to Liam in his most nonconfrontational voice, “I’m afraid you need to leave.”

Liam looks confused. “You need me to leave my own bedroom?”

Drew nods. “Yes. Because right now I need to lock myself in my trailer, and pout until you give me my way. And since I don’t have a trailer, I need to lock myself in here.”

Some days it’s all about the drink
.

Around nine o’clock that night, Liam follows me in his car, and I introduce my new roommate to his new digs for the next few weeks.

The argument went just as I thought it would. Drew wouldn’t stay in the film without his frozen dressing room, and after losing their Paris location, the movie’s financial backers were going to pull the plug if Liam lost Drew as well.

Liam spent almost a year of his life putting this movie together. It was his passion. So there was no doubt about it: for the next few weeks, as far as living companions went, he was all mine.

As I unlock my door and let him in, I fret over what he’ll think of where I live. I had raced home for an hour in the middle of the day to clean up, so the place didn’t look too bad. At the same time, it wasn’t exactly a sexy stewardess bachelorette pad that would make me look like the type of woman I figured a guy like Liam would date: jet set, perfect, sexy, perfect, funky, perfect. It was a boring little home with furniture cobbled together from all the castoffs my boss didn’t want anymore.