Little Known Facts A Novel - By Christine Sneed Page 0,84
same role that Melinda did for a while.”
Playing a role. I don’t like that expression when it’s not being used to talk about filmmaking. Life is real; it adds up to something. Yet I understand why we say it all the time. Real life is also surreal in a way that movies are not. One of the reasons I wanted to be an actor was because the best movies felt so much more important to me than my own day-to-day life. Now, ironically, they are my real life.
“It was a little awkward,” I admitted. “I think Anna knows that I’m worried about her.”
“He’s very nice though.”
“Yes, he seems to be.”
“Anna’s a year or so older than me, isn’t she?”
“Yes.”
She was silent.
“Why do you ask?” I said.
“Has she given you a hard time about me?”
“No, she hasn’t.” In fact, she had made a few comments about our age difference, but I didn’t feel like telling Elise. It would have hurt her feelings and she might have gotten upset, and there was no reason for her to feel that way. It wasn’t like I would break up with her if my daughter didn’t approve, but Elise certainly had cause to break up with me. I had seen Danielle after my return from France and had had sex with her, and I wanted to do it again. I knew that if I continued to see her, it would end badly, but I wasn’t yet ready to stop. It was likely to end badly no matter what. I did not want Danielle to tell me that she was in love with me, but because I have a hard time being a hardcore asshole, I brought her a couple of gifts back from Paris—a little keepsake box filled with handmade chocolates, and a necklace with a tiger’s-eye pendant that I’d found in one of the antique shops on the Left Bank. I bought Elise presents too, five of them. I spent a lot of money on them both, but more on Elise.
My favorite role, I suppose, is the romantic. It’s one that I play well, though romantics are dangerous—to themselves and to their lovers. Sometimes it’s only their stupidity that makes them dangerous. But often it’s also their selfishness.
A final note. About a week after I met Elise’s married boyfriend, I got a call from Lucy, Anna and Billy’s mother, saying that Billy was in the hospital. He’d been taken in because he had collapsed when he was out running earlier that day. He was dehydrated and hypoglycemic, and had apparently been out running something like twenty or thirty miles on the streets and trails near the Rose Bowl without enough water and no energy bars. A couple of other runners found him, probably not long after he collapsed. One of them had a cell phone, and they might have saved his life by moving him into the shade and getting him to swallow some water before the paramedics arrived and took him to the hospital.
I went to see him that afternoon, as soon as I could leave a meeting about a film I was hoping to direct and play the lead in starting in January, and it was only the third time since his ill-fated trip to New Orleans that I had seen my son. About a year had passed since the episode with the poem, and we still hadn’t talked about it, at least not in any meaningful way. No truce had been reached, neither of us having bothered to extend anything like an olive branch, and there I was, fucking his ex-girlfriend on the sly now too. When I went to the hospital to see him, I wondered for a panicked second if Danielle might be there, if Lucy had called her too, but I told myself that everything would be all right if she was. It wasn’t like I had shot and killed someone. We were all adults, capable of making our own decisions, as unwise as they might occasionally be. Elise was working, but I wouldn’t have brought her along even if she had been free. I hadn’t called her on my way to the hospital to tell her what had happened to Billy. To be frank, I wasn’t sure when I would tell her.
Lucy was in the room with Billy when I got there. Anna was too. They had attached an IV to his right hand. He looked exhausted and was sunburned. But he was conscious and alert, and