Little Known Facts A Novel - By Christine Sneed Page 0,36

of—how can one suppress the libido for the long term? It has never seemed possible to her. Instead, some people seem eventually to lose interest in sex, their hormone levels shifting, their habits and desires becoming uninteresting or possibly unpleasant.

“I’m not like my father,” she blurts. “I’ve never had an affair before.”

Dr. Glass stares at her, laughing a little in surprise. “I would never confuse you with your father, Anna. Please don’t think that. Working with you this past year, I think I have a pretty good sense of who you are.”

She looks at him. “You do?”

“For one,” he says, “you’ve never once mentioned your father or his fame.”

“It’s not something that I usually do.”

“I know.” He takes her hand from where it rests next to her plate and presses it to his lips. “I think you’re very lovely. I’ve never met anyone like you. You have so many things going for you, but you don’t ever seem to need to remind anyone of this.”

She has to look away from his earnest gaze. He is saying everything she wants to hear, but he doesn’t have to. She wants him, unequivocally, and within ten minutes they are at her house, the blinds closed, the radio clicked on so that they won’t have to hear her downstairs tenant walking around or talking on the phone with her windows wide open. Anna’s clothes are in a heap on the floor next to the bed, his draped over a chair. Even as she shivers with nervous desire for him, she can’t shut off her analytical mind. He put his shirt and pants over the chair so that they won’t wrinkle, she thinks. He doesn’t want his wife to wonder what he’s been doing, because of course she will be suspicious.

But then her mind does recede, or at least soften its cynical inquiry. Once his hands are on her breasts, his lips kissing the warm hollow of her neck, murmuring, “You’re so beautiful, Anna,” once the whole hot length of him is pressed against her shivering body, she knows that he is worth it, that whatever will happen, whatever expectations she will eventually have to forfeit, it is worth it to spend this hour with him, maybe two if he has the time to linger. She doesn’t know, can’t yet know, what he will be able to offer her. One of them will make most of the demands, she realizes, and it will probably become a pattern—the one asking, the other sometimes granting but often not. He will arrive at an appointed hour to undress himself and part her legs before getting into his car again and driving away until the next time she unlocks her door, behind which she has waited for him in something lacy and expensive. But right now, there is this first time, and it will always be the first time. She knows that she will remember it long after other details of this summer have faded. She will remember how he stepped out of his shoes and left them side by side next to her dresser, how he folded his pants over the chair before taking her into his arms and falling with her onto the cool, oceanic expanse of her bed.

Chapter 5

Stolen Gods

At age twenty-eight, instead of being a promising young screenwriter who has just bought a custom-tailored tux for the Oscars, I’m a freelance propmaster whose biggest claim to fame so far is that Renn Ivins remembers my name when our paths cross during a shoot. This wouldn’t bother me so much if I thought that my screenplays were MFBS (masturbatory-fantasy bullshit), but they aren’t. They’re original, morally complex stories like Truffaut’s and Kieslowski’s, but I’m in Hollywood, not in France or Poland or even New York. Needless to say, no one gives a shit.

It could be that I don’t fit in here the way I should, despite going to UCLA and spending the last ten years of my life in southern California. Countless people, I’m pretty sure, live large portions of their lives within pissing distance of the 101, the 110, and the 405, but don’t ever really feel like they fit in. It depends in part on what you expect from your life—if you want to be rich and famous, this probably isn’t the best place to start, paradoxical as that must sound. You would probably be better off writing screenplays and making short films in Omaha or Minneapolis for a while and approaching Hollywood from