One Fifth Avenue (12 page)

He’d directed lots of TV and, recently, two hit movies. Milling around was the usual crowd of crew and executives, all wondering, no doubt, what Schiffer was going to be like. Difficult or professional? Schiffer was friendly but removed.

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Candace Bushnell

“You know the drill, right?” Asa said. She was led onto the set. Told to walk toward the camera. Turn to the right. Turn to the left. The bat-tery in the camera died. There was a four-minute break while someone replaced it. She walked away and stood behind the director’s chairs. The executive producers were in a conversation with the network executives.

“She still looks good.”

“Yes, she looks great.”

“But too pale, maybe.”

She was sent back to the makeup room for an adjustment. Sitting in the chair, she recalled the afternoon when Philip had knocked on the door of her trailer. He was still put out that she’d called his movie lousy.

“If you think my movie sucks, why are you in it?” he’d asked.

“I didn’t say it sucked. I said it was lousy. There’s a big difference. You’re going to need much thicker skin if you’re going to survive in Hollywood,”

she’d said.

“Who said I want to survive in Hollywood? And what makes you think I don’t have thick skin?”

“And what do you know, anyway?” he asked later, when they were having drinks at the outdoor tiki bar in the hotel. “It’s only your second movie.”

“I’m a fast learner,” she said. “How about you?”

He ordered two shots of tequila, then two more. There was a pool table in the back of the bar, and they used every excuse to accidentally touch each other. The first kiss happened outside the bathroom, located in a little hut. When she came out, he was waiting for her. “I was thinking about what you said, about how Hollywood corrupts.”

She leaned back against the rough wood of the hut and laughed. “You don’t have to take everything I say at face value. Sometimes I say things just to hear how they sound. Any crime in that?”

“No,” he said, putting his hand on the wall above her shoulder. “But it means I’m never going to know when you’re serious.” Her head was tilted back to look at him, although he wasn’t so much taller than she was—maybe six inches. But then his arm was around her back, and they were kissing, and his mouth was so soft. They were both startled and broke away, then went back to the bar and had another tequila shot, but O N E F I F T H AV E N U E

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the line had been crossed, and soon they were kissing at the bar and putting their hands on each other’s faces and backs until the bartender said,

“Get a room.”

She laughed. “Oh, we have one.”

Back in her room, they engaged in the long, delicious process of getting to know each other’s bodies. When they took off their shirts and pressed together, the sensation of skin on skin was a revelation. They lay together for a while, like high school kids who have all the time in the world and don’t need to go too far too fast; then they took off their pants and pantomimed sex—his penis touching her vagina through their undergarments. All through the night, they touched and kissed, dozing off and waking to the joy of finding the other in the bed, and then the kissing started again, and finally, in the early morning when it was right, he entered her. There was nothing like that first push, and it so overwhelmed them that he stopped, just let his penis be inside her, while they absorbed the miracle of two pieces that fit perfectly together.

She had a seven A.M. call, but at ten A.M., during a break in shooting, he was in her trailer and they were doing it on the small bed in the back with the polyester sheets. They did it three more times that day, and during dinner with the crew, she sat with her leg over his, and he kept putting his hand under her shirt to touch her waist. By then the whole crew knew, but set romances were a given in the intimacy and stress of getting a movie made. Though they usually ended when the movie wrapped, Philip came to L.A. and moved into her bungalow. They played house like any other young couple discovering the wonders of companionship, when the mundane was new and even a trip to the supermarket could be an adventure. Their anonymous bliss lasted only a short while, however, because then the movie came out, and it was huge.

Their relationship was suddenly public. They rented a bigger house with a gate in the Hollywood Hills, but they couldn’t keep the outside world from creeping in, and that started the trouble.

Their first fight was over an article in a magazine that featured her on the cover. In the piece, she was quoted as saying, “I can’t take making movies too seriously. In the end, it’s not that different from what little girls do when they’re playing dress-up.” She came home from a 80

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meeting one afternoon and found the magazine on the coffee table and Philip in a foul mood over her quote. “Is that what you think about my work?” he said.

“It doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

“That’s right,” he said, “because everything is about you. Did you ever consider the fact that it’s my movie you were talking about?”

“Don’t take yourself so seriously. It’s not attractive.” But she had, it seemed, irrevocably bruised his ego. They continued on for a little longer, then he moved back to New York. A miserable month passed before he called her. “I’ve been thinking. It’s not us. It’s Hollywood. Why don’t you come to New York?”

She’d been twenty-four then, willing to take on any adventure. But that was over twenty years ago, she thought now, staring at her reflection in the makeup mirror. In the harsh light of the bare bulbs, there was no denying that she no longer looked like that girl. Her face had matured; it was more angular and hollow, and no one would mistake her for an ingenue. But she knew a lot more about what she wanted from life and what no longer mattered.

But did Philip know? Leaning in to the mirror to check her makeup, she wondered what he’d thought when she’d run into him in the elevator. Did he see her as middle-aged? Did he still find her attractive?

The last time she’d seen him had been ten years ago. She’d been in New York doing publicity for a movie when she ran into Philip in the lobby of One Fifth. They hadn’t talked in over a year, but they immediately fell into their old habits, and when she’d finished her last interview, they’d met for dinner at Da Silvano. At eleven o’clock there was a terrific thunderstorm, trapping everyone inside, and the waiters cleared away the tables and turned up the music, and everyone danced. “I love you,” Philip said. “You’re my best friend.”

“You’re my best friend, too.”

“We understand each other. We’ll always be friends.”

They went back to her apartment. She had an antique four-poster bed she’d had shipped from England; that year she’d spent two months in London doing a play and become enamored with the idea of English country houses. Philip was propped up on his arms above her, his hair falling into her face. They made love hard and seriously, astounded by O N E F I F T H AV E N U E

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how good it still was, which once again brought up the issue of being together. He asked about her schedule. She was flying to Europe and was supposed to go directly back to L.A. but said she’d make a detour and spend at least a few days in New York. Then she went to Europe and got stuck there for an extra two weeks and had to go directly back to L.A. Then she started a movie that was shooting in Vancouver and India. Six months passed, and she heard from someone that Philip was getting married. She got on a plane and flew to New York to confront him.

“You can’t get married,” she said.

“Why not?”

“What about us?”

“There is no us.”

“Only because you don’t want there to be.”

“Whether I want it or not is irrelevant. It doesn’t exist.”

“Who is she?” Schiffer demanded. “What does she do?”

Her name was Susan, and she taught at a private school in Manhattan.

When Schiffer insisted, he showed her a photograph. She was twenty-six, pretty, and utterly bland. “After all the women you’ve been with, why her?”

she asked.

“I’m in love with her. She’s nice,” Philip said.

Schiffer raged and then begged. “What does she have that I don’t have?”

“She’s stable.”

“I can be stable.”

“She’s in the same place all the time.”

“And that’s what you want? Some little mouse who will do everything you say?”

“You don’t know Susan. She’s very independent.”

“She’s dependent. That’s the real reason why you want to marry her.

At least be truthful about your motives.”

“We’re getting married on September twenty-sixth.”

“Where?”

“I won’t tell you. I don’t want you to crash the wedding.”

“I’m not going to crash it. Why are you so worried? I bet you’re getting married in her parents’ backyard.”

“Their country house, actually. In East Hampton.”

She did crash the wedding by enlisting Billy Litchfield to help her. They 82

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hid in the hedges surrounding the property. She watched Philip in a white linen suit say “I do” to another woman. For months afterward, she justified her behavior by claiming Philip’s marriage was like a death: One needed to see the dead body in order to believe the soul was really gone.

A little over a year had passed when she heard from an agent that Philip was getting divorced. His marriage had lasted fourteen months.

But by then it was too late. Schiffer was engaged to the English marquis, an aging glamour boy who turned out to have a vicious drug habit. When he died in a boating accident in Saint-Tropez, she went back to L.A. to restart her career.

There was no work, her agent told her—she’d been away for too long, and she was over thirty-five. He said she ought to do what every other actress did and start having children. Being alone in L.A. without work to distract her from her husband’s death slammed her into a deep depression, and one day she didn’t bother to get out of bed. She stayed there for weeks.

Philip had come to L.A. in that time, but she’d made excuses not to see him. She couldn’t see anyone. She could barely leave the house in Los Feliz. The thought of driving down the hill to the supermarket exhausted her, it took hours to work up the energy to gather her things, get in the car, and back it out of the garage. Steering the car along the hairpin turns, she looked for places where she might drive off the road and into a steep ravine, but she wasn’t sure an accident would result in death, and it might leave her worse off than she already was.

Her agent forced her to lunch one afternoon at the Polo Club. She could barely speak and picked at her food. “What’s wrong with you?”

he asked. She shook her head, murmuring, “I don’t know.”

“I can’t send you out like this. Hollywood is a cruel town. They’ll say you’ll never work again, if they’re not saying it already. Why don’t you go to the desert? Or Mexico. Even Malibu, for Christ’s sake. Take a couple of weeks. Or a month. When you come back, I can probably get you a part playing someone’s mother.”

When the interminable lunch was over and she was back in her car driving down Sunset, she began to cry uncontrollably and couldn’t stop for several hours. There was the unaccountable despair, but the shame was the worst of it. People like her weren’t supposed to be depressed, but she O N E F I F T H AV E N U E

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felt broken and didn’t know how to fix herself. Out of pity, her agent sent her a script for a TV series. She refused to meet the writer for lunch but allowed him to come to the house. His name was Tom, and he was younger than she and eager and sensitive and wasn’t put off by her weakness. He said he wanted to help her, and she let him, and soon they were lovers, and shortly thereafter, he moved in. She didn’t take the part in the series, but it was a hit, and Tom made money and stuck with her, and then they were married. She started working again, too, and made three independent movies, one of which was nominated for an Oscar, putting her back on the map. Things were good with Tom, too. He made another TV

show, and it was a hit as well, but then he had to work all the time, and they became irritated with each other. She took nearly every part she was offered in order to get away from him and their marriage. They continued like that for another three years, and then she found out Tom was having an affair, and it was easy. They’d been married six years, and not once in those six years did she stop thinking about Philip or what her life would have been like if she were with him instead.

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L ately, sex was weighing heavily on Mindy’s mind. She and James didn’t do it enough. In fact, they didn’t do it at all. Looking at it optimistically, they did it once or twice a year. It was terrible and wrong and made Mindy feel like she was a bad wife, not doing her duty, but at the same time, it was such a relief not to do it.

The problem was, it hurt. She knew this could be an issue for women as they got older. But she thought it didn’t happen until well after menopause. She’d never expected it to happen so soon. At the beginning, when she’d first met James, and even into their fourth or fifth year of marriage, she’d prided herself on being good at sex. For years after Sam was born, she and James would do it once a week and really make a night of it. They had things they liked to do. Mindy liked to be tied up, and sometimes she would tie James up (they had special ties they used for this practice—old Brooks Brothers ties James had worn in college), and when James was tied up, she would ride his penis like a banshee. Over time, the sex started to dwindle, which was normal for married couples, but they still did it once or twice a month, and then, two years ago, the pain came. She went to her female gynecologist and tried to talk about O N E F I F T H AV E N U E

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it, but the doctor said her vagina wasn’t dried up and she wasn’t going through menopause and she should use lotions. Mindy knew all about sex lotions, but they didn’t work, either. So she bought a vibrator. Nothing fancy, just a plain slim tube of colored light blue plastic. She didn’t know why she picked light blue. It was better than pink or purple, she supposed. On a Saturday afternoon when James was out with Sam, she tried to put the vibrator in her vagina but could get it no farther than an inch before the pain started. She began avoiding sex altogether. James never asked her about it, but the lack of sex in their marriage lay between them like a sack of potatoes. Mindy felt guilty and ashamed, although she told herself it didn’t matter.