would remember for a long time. It was a confession, a startling one that she would keep to herself until she started seeing a therapist several months later who suggested that she ask herself if maybe it was the son she really wanted, not the father. The therapist would also say that Elise was probably not ready to commit to anyone for the long term and might not be ready to do so for several years.
“If it weren’t for my dad,” Billy said quietly, “I’d be doing everything I could to convince you to go out with me.”
She didn’t know what to say, but when she opened her mouth to speak, he held up his hand. “Please forget I said that,” he said, blushing. “I never say things like that.”
“I’m very flattered,” she said softly.
“You are?”
“Of course I am, Billy.”
We faltered, his smile apologetic. “Would you mind calling me Will?”
“Oh,” she said, embarrassed. “Sure. I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s fine. I just prefer Will.” He pulled a folded piece of yellow paper from the back pocket of his shorts and handed it to her. “This is for you. I hope you won’t show it to anyone.”
She stared at him. “What is it?”
“It’s something I wrote last night. I’m not a writer, so it’s not very good.”
She could feel her stomach leap. “Hey,” she said. “You should never apologize for a gift. That’s something my grandfather taught me. He’d even refuse a gift if someone apologized for it. My grandmother hated it when he did this, but people stopped apologizing, or else maybe they just bought him better presents.” Her cell phone started to ring then, the ringtone the one she had assigned to Renn, but she didn’t reach into her purse to answer it.
“You’d better get that. I’ll see you later,” said Billy.
“Billy. Will, I mean. Wait.”
He looked at her.
She held up the note. “Thank you.”
He nodded, then turned and left her with the paper gripped in her damp fingers. Her room was in the opposite direction, around the corner and at the far end of the hall, only three doors down from Renn, something she wondered if he had requested when their hotel rooms had been reserved. She couldn’t wait to read Will’s note, but when she was slipping her key card into her door, Renn opened his door and she hastily stashed the note in her purse, annoyed but not showing it. He was wearing his robe and a smile, the robe meaning that he wanted to have sex before dinner. After dinner, if there was no night shoot scheduled, his habit was to watch the dailies. If they waited until after the dailies to have sex, he was sometimes too tired, or else he didn’t last long and she would have to finish for herself. But when he was awake and had the energy, he was the best lover she had ever had.
4.
Six days later, Will went back to L.A. He left without saying goodbye, and although she had a pretty good idea why he left the set early, she was surprised that he hadn’t tried to speak to her one more time before going home. She didn’t have his phone number, and she wasn’t sure where he lived, only that his place was close to the Getty. The night he gave her the note, she hadn’t been able to read it until almost midnight; Renn had asked her to watch the dailies with him, and she said yes because he didn’t always ask. Taking her clothes off and slipping into bed with him before dinner, she was reminded that he was the most exciting man she had met in a long time, much more exciting than the French teacher she had had a crush on during her junior year at UT-Austin, a young professor whom all the female students and a few of the male students had been smitten with because he was from Paris and not yet thirty, but most of all because he resembled Olivier Martinez, the sexiest film star anywhere, aside from Renn maybe, that Elise could think of. As if she had scripted it, M. Tanguy became her lover a few weeks after the semester ended. She had run into him at the grocery store, where he was buying mangoes and Camembert. He had chuckled over the cliché: “I love French cheese,” he said, grinning adorably. “It is true that you cannot take the France out of the Frenchman.” That he had not spoken