day at a time,” Anna insisted. “I couldn’t do anything else even if I wanted to.”
Now, in Paris, he was sending e-mails to Elise again, telling her where he was, asking her to join him if she was in Europe or had a reason to come to Europe. He was acting without scruples, he realized, with these ongoing attempts to woo away the girl his father seemed to love, though he doubted that Renn was being faithful to her. As far as Will could tell, his father hadn’t been faithful to any of the women he had made a public commitment to, and it seemed unlikely that he would ever change this behavior for good, despite how beautiful Elise was, or how remarkable her talents.
From what Will could tell, truly talented actors had the ability to forget their insecurities, to be shameless and joyful in front of a camera and crew, to risk with a stony will other people’s laughter or derision. They also had to have the feeling, whether they acknowledged it or not, that people wanted to look at them, and that these people wouldn’t be able to stop looking. Elise might have been a little shy in her personal interactions with friends and acquaintances, but Will knew that she had a streak of exhibitionism in her too, as did his father. If the age difference between them hadn’t been so egregious, Will might even have thought that they were a good match. And, as much as he disliked doing so, he had to admit that his father could offer her things that he could not, especially when it came to her career.
What he himself could offer her might not be as extraordinary as what his father could give her, but Will knew that without question, he would be committed to her. He could offer her sexual fidelity, which, based on all precedent, his father could not. Will also believed that he could offer her sanctuary from the world his father and she publicly inhabited, one that often had its tentacles in almost all aspects of their private lives too. Not being famous the way his father was, Will did not have paparazzi following him into restaurants and stores or waiting on the street outside his house. He did not have a cell phone that rang twenty-five times an hour. He was his own person in a way that his father was not.
And so he persisted. He had never done such a thing before, never tried to poach some other man’s girlfriend. Despite his adherence to talk therapy’s dictum that doctors not tell their patients what to do, the previous summer Will’s therapist, Dr. Shepherd, had bluntly said: “You need to direct your energies elsewhere. You’ll only make yourself unhappy if you keep pursuing her. If she wants you, she’ll come to you. But even if she does, you must still consider your father’s feelings.”
Paris, two-thousand-year-old glittering city of lights, the Louvre, and the lovelorn, was the trapdoor through which he had plunged, hoping to escape from his disapproving therapist, his parents, his disappointments and jealousies. That he had escaped from some but not all of these things was a relief, but the heaviest burdens had remained with him. Before he left, he had told no one that he was going to France—not his sister or parents or the few friends he saw regularly—because he would not have been able to say how long he planned to stay or why exactly he was going, and he imagined them asking, Won’t you be lonely, not knowing anyone there (except for Luca’s father, who was busy with his own life)? His father had friends in Paris, and Will knew a couple of people from college who lived there too, but no one well enough to call a friend. It seemed best not to think too long about his motives because this was the first time in years, aside from his pursuit of Elise, that he had done something with spontaneity and an almost giddy sense of adventure. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein and Toklas, Josephine Baker, Alexander Calder—other adventurous souls had also escaped the sock garters and girdles and prudishness and fearful, unquestioning mediocrity of their hometowns for Paris’s salons and august boulevards, its verdant parks where art seemed to be created as effortlessly as California smog. He was not an artist, but it was possible that he would become one, or at least become something other than the floundering, directionless son