Little Known Facts A Novel - By Christine Sneed Page 0,55
her desire for him, and ashamed of herself for giving in to her curiosity and lust when she was the girlfriend of Renn Ivins, a handsome and very talented actor-director-screenwriter whom she knew she should consider herself lucky to work with, let alone share a bed with.
Will had said nothing after she pulled away, even though she meekly apologized before leaving him in his bachelor’s room with its bedside lamp illuminating the rumpled bed, the sheets and comforter twisted violently, as if by a fever victim.
7.
One thing she had been warned about but had found herself unprepared for was how it seemed that almost everyone she knew now felt entitled to gifts of money from her. Loans she would have been more amenable to, but the few people who pretended they were asking for loans made it seem as if it were a joke—she had enough money, didn’t she? Why couldn’t she just give it to them? Ha ha. Only kidding.
They also wanted auditions or some sort of industry job or introductions to other famous people, whether she knew them or not. They wanted invitations to A-list parties (or B- and C-list—any Hollywood party would do), and life-size cardboard cutouts of characters in films that had been released years earlier. They wanted to borrow the clothes she had worn for a role, which were the studio’s, not hers. They wanted to stay at her house for a couple of weeks while they looked for a place of their own, or else they just wanted to live with her, period, and be a part of her entourage, because surely she had one. Didn’t all famous people have entourages? Even worse was that people she had barely said three words to in high school or college were somehow finding her private e-mail address or phone number or else they were leaving messages at the studio asking her to help them break in to the business. She was also being asked to donate to every imaginable charity, to put in guest appearances at fund-raisers and hospital galas and company picnics and grocery store and car-dealership grand openings and the quinceñera for her landscaper’s daughter. When she complained about these requests to her agent, he told her to let her personal assistant or her publicist talk to the demand-makers; she should never talk to them herself. When she complained to Renn, he laughed and said, “You’ll need to get used to these kinds of requests as fast as you can. The more successful you are, the worse it gets.”
In airports, at the post office and the gas station and Starbucks, she was asked for her autograph. She was told how beautiful she was—even more so in person than on the silver screen! (a claim she didn’t really believe)—how talented, how destined she was for everything a person could hope for: Oscars, Golden Globes, the perfect husband, the perfect children, the perfect house and house pets and gardener and poolmen and Grammys. (Oh wait, Ms. Connor, those are for singers, aren’t they?)
Because now, quite suddenly, she had something that tyrants and revolutionaries had waged wars over for thousands of years: power—both financial and sexual. It was not an illusion either; she could ask for any material object or personal service that she desired, pay for it, and have it delivered, overnight or later that same day. Any straight man she wanted, she could probably also have. Her power alarmed her, and on one morning when the sun shone furiously behind her heavy silk shantung curtains (new and expensively hand-sewn) at the house she had bought in Laurel Canyon less than a year earlier, she had been seriously resistant to getting out of bed. This was after Bourbon at Dusk had wrapped, while Renn spent four nearly sleepless weeks editing the film, fortifying himself with caffeine and something stronger from his doctor, she suspected—during which she was alone with him precisely five times, one of them on New Year’s Eve, and only for three hours. He couldn’t afford any real breaks until he was done editing the dozens of scenes they had shot into a presentable enough format to submit to the Cannes Festival’s screening committee by their mid-February deadline.
She had gone home to Dallas for Christmas because she knew that Renn planned to see Will and Anna and then go right back to editing. Elise wasn’t sure if she would be invited and assumed not, considering Will’s love poem, which Renn had not brought up