Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See (23 page)

So, as Victor’s agent, I kept my mouth shut—about the one-night stands and meaningless flings he indulged in while on location. Not just because he was my client, but because he was a good man who loved his wife and kids. And because he couldn’t help it. He was an actor, and like many of the best, he was disciplined when it came to his craft but lacked a shred of will power when it came to what and whom he did after he wrapped for the day. It was SOP that what happened on location stayed on location.

But this was different. Too close to home. Shitting where he ate. Screw the trysts with Didi—Victor was courting disaster.

“So Kate doesn’t know?”

“Oh God, no,” Victor said. “What a fucking disaster that would be.”

“And Hugh?”

“No! I don’t know. I don’t think so.” Suddenly Victor looked worried.

“But, it’s not … serious? You’re not—” I was trying to tread carefully.

“Oh for Chrissake, Greyson, do I look like I’m in fucking high school?”

“So things with you and Kate—?”

“Are fine. They’re fine. It’s just not as much … fun.”

“Fun.”

“Yeah. Didi throws a fuck like she throws a party.”

“Victor, you don’t like parties.”

“Yeah, but I like fucking.”

I couldn’t help laughing. “Okay, Victor, agent-client privilege has been invoked.”

We started walking again. The tide was rising. We’d have to dodge the jetty to get back without getting soaked—time it just right and run between the waves.

“Actually, the sex is fine, but when I think about it later it’s never as good as I thought it was at the time.”

“With Kate? Or Didi?”

“Didi. Jesus, Greyson, keep up.”

“Just want to make sure I’ve got my facts straight.”

“So every time I’m fucking her—Didi—I’m also telling myself it’s not worth it—swearing to God, Kate, and myself I’ll never do it again.”

“You sure you’re not Jewish?”

“Wanna see my dick?” Victor asked, going for his belt.

“You don’t do full frontal,” I informed him. “It’s ironclad. In all your contracts.”

“Really?” Victor seemed genuinely surprised.

“Really,” I told him.

We kept walking. The waves broke farther up on the beach. Cold water foamy on top, clear underneath, and filled with pebbles and shards of shell rushed over our feet and ankles and rose to our knees.

We grinned at each other like psychopaths.

“Cold, huh?” I said through clenched teeth.

“Fuckin’ A.”

We turned around and headed back. For a while, neither of us said anything. I just watched over and over again as my feet made depressions in the sand that disappeared almost immediately. It was like I was weightless. I looked behind me. I’d left nothing behind. Nothing. Had I ever been there at all? Where was the proof?

“Greyson?” All I heard was static. I went back to my feet, my footprints, appearing and disappearing. Appear and disappear. I tried leaning into the sand; really pushing my weight into each step. They’d linger maybe a second longer, maybe two. And disappear.

“Greyson, you there?”

I looked behind me. Nothing.

It was as if I was leaving almost before I got there. The more I watched it happen, the more anxious I became. I told myself it was crazy and tried to look away. And the panic rose. I couldn’t stop thinking, if that mark, that proof of my existence, could be erased so quickly, what would be next?

Victor shook my shoulder gently. “Greyson! You okay?” Victor was next to me. We were talking and walking. Our pants were wet. And cold. Victor could see me. For the moment, the disappearing hadn’t spread beyond my feet.

“Uh, yeah, just thinking.”

“I must be getting old. It’s the after-sex fun I miss,” he said.

“Uh-huh.” What were we talking about?

“That’s what’s so great about Didi. That’s the party. We lie around in bed. We laugh and she cooks and we watch old movies.”

Right. Victor. Didi. Affair. “And you can’t do that with Kate?”

“Nah. The sex is still pretty good but the second it’s over she’s stuffing Kleenex up her pussy and talking about the menu for some god-awful dinner party she’s planning for next week.”

I put my arm around him. It was important that he feel like he could depend on me. That they could all depend on me. All the time. I was the rock to which they clung. I could not falter. Ever.

“Can you schedule an emergency meeting for us at Fox so I don’t have to go?”

“Can’t,” I said. “I have to go to your god-awful dinner party.”

When we got back to the house, Victor turned on the hose at the bottom of the stairs and rinsed the sand off his feet. Then he tried to hand it to me.

I jumped back, away from the running water. “No. Thank you.”

“What? Jesus Christ, Grey.”

“Go ahead, I’ll be up in a … I just … I thought I saw a house for sale up the beach,” I said, hoping I sounded convincing. “I want to take a look.”

“You want me to come with you?” Victor sounded concerned.

“No, go be with your kids. I’ll be right back.”

My feet were still there. So far so good. I looked over my shoulder. Victor was halfway up the stairs. He waved. I waved back like a fucking Mouseketeer.

Just get in the goddamned house, Victor
.

When he was finally out of sight, I climbed up and under the house next to Didi and Hugh’s. Like a lot of houses in Malibu, it was built on enormous wood pylons and sat eight or ten feet off the ground. I sat down in the soft, damp sand and tried to will this reality away—tried to replace it with the one I knew should be there. The one that had been there. I’d just had it. Which meant I had only misplaced it. Like I do with my car keys all the time. And I get pissed off and yell and swear. And then Ellen finds them for me. And it’s always somewhere I should have looked. But didn’t. That’s what this was. I buried myself in sand so I wouldn’t blow away. But I left my feet sticking out.

When Victor came back alone, Ellen knew something had happened. She also knew she couldn’t tell anyone. So she took a flashlight from the Lazars’ utility closet and trudged up the beach by herself. It wasn’t hard to find me shivering under the neighbor’s house like a wounded animal. With great difficulty she lowered herself down next to me and wrapped her shawl around me.

“Grey, sweetheart, I think we all feel that way sometimes,” she said when I explained about my footprints and fading existence. “You just feel it louder and bigger. The first thing we need to do is get you on solid ground. So you can feel your feet.” That’s when I knew I was going to be all right. I had misplaced myself for a little while and she had found me and put me back in the world. Simple as that.

Ellen went back inside and made our excuses. In the car, I rubbed one bare, sandy foot over the other and it started to snow. A fine, white dusting that settled into the black carpeting of the floor mat. The car wash guys would have to use the Power Vac on it. I’d swing by in the morning before my eight-thirty breakfast meeting. No one would know.

No one but Ellen. And she would never tell. She would make it okay. She always had.

Beverly Hills, 1961
. Before I could say anything to stop her, Ellen was dragging a carton toward the back of Van Gilder’s truck.

Jesus Christ. Some first date.

“Well,” she said, breathless and bossy, “don’t just stand there. Help me!”

I ran over and lifted the thing onto the flatbed.

When I turned around, she was standing so close I could feel the heat coming off her skin. I looked her in the eye and she didn’t look away.

“Sorry,” I said, suddenly self-conscious. “I need a shower. I probably stink.”

She inched forward and stood on her tiptoes and I felt her breath on my neck.

“I like the way you smell just fine,” she whispered. Then she smiled shyly and walked toward the pile of Sears merchandise, swinging her hips. “Well, are you going to help or do I have to haul this canoe myself?” she said. But I wasn’t sure I could walk just then, much less carry a canoe.

It wasn’t the beginning I had planned. But in a way I had never imagined, it was turning out to be better.

Beverly Hills, July 1981
. “Ellen—Forever My Love—Grey.” I’d paid Cartier an extra $350 on top of the cost of the watch for same-day engraving. I’d have paid $1,000, I thought, as I waited for the girl to wrap it. And I would have paid for a much more expensive watch. But I knew my wife.

“Are you sure?” the sales girl had asked that morning. “We have some lovely new designs in. Delicate with diamond bands.”

“I’m sure. I know what I want,” I told her.

“If it’s a matter of price …,” she went on.

“Money is not the issue,” I said. “My wife is not some Beverly Hills JAP. She wouldn’t wear a diamond watch if you gave it to her for free.”

So she rang up the watch I’d chosen, the signature Cartier: octagonal, white face with Roman numerals, 22 karat gold wrapped around beveled edges, a black crocodile band. Simple, elegant, not at all ostentatious. Classic Ellen.

“Gift card?” the girl asked and without waiting for an answer handed me the little Cartier-embossed ecru square and matching envelope.

But I had nothing to say for myself. The expensive watch was supposed to do the talking for me. And the begging and apologizing and promising that it would never happen again. Because the night before, almost but not quite out of nowhere, it
had
happened. Again.

I remember coming home from work late, but not in a bad mood. I was buoyant actually. I’d just signed a new director and couldn’t wait to tell Ellen the news. When I came in, she was lying across the couch with a book across her stomach. She didn’t even bother to get up.

“Hi, Greyson, how was your day? Can I get you a scotch?” I yelled and then threw my jacket at her.

Without saying a word, she got up, made the drink, and handed it to me. Then she asked. But not like she meant it. She listened and then, instead of congratulating me, what she hit me with was, “Why is it nothing I do or think is worth asking about?” And that knocked the last breath of victory out of me. “It wasn’t always that way,” she went on. “You used to at least allow for the possibility that something interesting might have happened to me.”

“You just crapped all over my A-plus day, you know that?”

“I’m sorry, I just had some news too. But I didn’t mean to—I mean, it’s great that you signed Bromwell.”

“Burnwell!”

“Burnwell, sorry.” Ellen was shaking a little now.

“Stop apologizing. Jesus.” And that, I think, is when I threw my drink at the wall.

“Greyson, what the hell?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know. I just. Shit! I was in such a fucking good mood.”

“Grey, you still signed the damn client. That didn’t go away.”

But it felt like it had. And in place of all that joy was this roiling funnel of black rage. I poured myself another drink and swallowed it quickly to try to force the black back down with it. “What did you want to tell me?” I asked Ellen, trying to fake casual conversation. She looked pale.

“Nothing. It can wait.”

And now suddenly I needed to know immediately. Nothing was more crucial.

“No, tell me. Now. What is it?”

“Not when you’re like this. You’ll get angry.”

“Oh, so now you’re in my fuckin’ brain? You know how I’m going to react?”

“No. I’m just saying I don’t think this is the best time—”

“Don’t fucking manage me, goddammit!” I screamed.

“Okay. Fine. I went by UCLA today and registered for classes for next semester. To finish my degree.”

It was like a slap in the face. Like what we had wasn’t good enough. “College? Why the fuck would you do that?”

“Just to finish up my degree.”

“You have a child.”

“Who’s in school most of the day.”

“So what? What? You’re telling me you’re going to take this degree and go get some fucking job? Is that it? You want people to think my wife has to work?”

After that, I was out of the gate like a champion. Rage fueled by the same energy that fueled the euphoria I’d felt just moments before—out of control, electric, and limitless, but mean. And everything fell away but the target of my anger.

I did not even register that Ellen looked scared. And at first she did not know how scared she should be. “I deserve this opportunity,” she said. “Dr. Brody says it’s my turn. I put you through law school. It’s only fair.”

I was incapable of setting an object down; shoes had to be hurled, books torn from the shelf, wedding photos ripped from albums. Shredded. The energy was too much; it had to come out—too mean, the vitriol too had to come out. And it spattered all over the room like blood.

“You want to be paid back? Is that it, you nickel-and-diming little bitch?”

“Shh. Please. Willa’s going to hear.”

I slung my money clip at her and it took a chip out of the paint on the wall behind her head.

“Okay, that’s it. Calm down. I won’t have a discussion with you when you get like this.”

“Fuck you! Like what? Does your bitch shrink have a diagnosis for your ingratitude?”

“Why are you yelling? And who made the mess?” Willa stood in the doorway, and the moment she entered the room, Ellen was on her feet, pushing Willa behind her, out of the way, out of my way. Like I might hurt my daughter. I waited while Ellen put her back to bed, but Ellen stayed—locked in Willa’s room with her. I banged on the door and hurled accusations and called Ellen names normally reserved for X-rated movies and the asshole who cuts you off on the 405.

I woke up naked in a chaise longue by the pool. I don’t remember how I got there. I only remember the rage and, before that, walking on air. And the split second it took for there to be nothing in between. And then the endless expanse of remorse. Again.

Because I always wanted to take it all back. But there was an irrevocable rupture—raw and still bleeding where the dam had burst inside. And the damage was done.

I had never hit either of them. I was sure I would never cross that line. Wasn’t I? And so all I could do was apologize. Watches, earrings, bracelets, necklaces. Velvet boxes filled with remorse. Ellen had at least a dozen. And tonight, after a client dinner, I would go home and give her one more.