Little Known Facts A Novel - By Christine Sneed Page 0,59

that seemed to have come true. Not surprisingly, I assumed that he’d be the love of my life.

It should be clear from the start how much I cared for him because some of the things I have to say on these pages won’t flatter him. Nonetheless, I feel like I have to write this book because a lot of people think that marrying a movie star is the next best thing to being a movie star. Well, guess what, it’s not. It’s very hard. Basically impossible, as it turns out, and I’m pretty sure that Renn’s first wife would agree with me, considering how things worked out for her too. I have never suffered so much as I did during the four and a half years of my marriage to Renn. I never once felt that I had him for real. I assumed that he would go back to his wife and kids, or that one of his beautiful, famous costars would steal him from me. It happens all the time. If it didn’t, part of the economy would collapse because a whole slew of gossip rags and bloggers would be out of business. The fact that it doesn’t happen even more often is a mystery to me. If you spend three months, six or seven days a week, behaving with someone the same way that you behave with your lawfully wedded husband or wife because the script calls for it, you are bound to get attached. The line between what’s real and what’s not is easy to blur, and on a movie set, it sometimes feels like how my college dorm felt on Friday nights—there’s the sense that just about anything goes, and with everyone’s parents so far away and oblivious to what their children are up to, sometimes crazy things do happen.

RENN & CO.

Where is Andrea, Renn’s brother’s coveted girlfriend, now? She’s married, with three grown daughters, and lives in Youngstown, Ohio, where she’s been an elementary school teacher for the past twenty-four years. (I know this because Renn’s brother [Phil] told me. He got in touch with her recently through Facebook. Renn’s brother’s Facebook friends: 217. Renn’s Facebook followers: 1,089,476. Not as many as younger actors, but still a pretty good number for an actor in his fifties. He [or, more likely, his publicist] maintains a fan page instead of a regular account because I suppose it would be too hard to keep up with so many individual “friends,” and he would also probably have to deal with a lot of messages and posts from fans gone rabid. I used to have these nightmares where strange women would come up to me and throw acid in my face when I was out with Renn because they were so jealous. It never happened, but more than a few times we almost had to run away [literally] from someone who wouldn’t leave us alone.)

I once asked Renn if Andrea ever contacted him after he became famous, and he said that she had. I asked if anything had happened between them. It took him a few seconds to reply, but he said no, no, he was already married to Lucy by then.

Where is Renn’s brother now? In Niles, Illinois, which is a Chicago suburb not far from where they grew up. Phil is also a teacher, though he teaches high school students, not grade-schoolers. He works at Niles North, which is close to a fancy shopping mall where a month before we were married, Renn bought me three thousand dollars’ worth of clothes at the Marshall Field’s department store—four dresses, three pairs of shoes, two summer sweaters, one pair of tailored linen slacks. We were visiting Phil and his family because Phil’s son was graduating from high school and he wanted Uncle Renn to come and make him look good in front of all of his unconvincingly jaded classmates. Renn was nice about obliging because he liked playing the role of the coolest uncle in the world, as Phil’s son called him in front of all of his teachers and the entire graduating class during his salutatorian speech. Tyler didn’t mention his father in the speech, but Phil was smiling when I glanced at him. I suppose he had gotten used to the fact he couldn’t compete with his brother, at least not anymore.

The irony is, after Tyler’s speech, Renn said to me under his breath, “I wish my own son felt even half as lucky to have me as