Girl Act Page 6

  “Okay,” I replied. Then he inched over on the couch so I could squeeze next to him, and I wanted to; it was a strange and larger-than-life moment for me and so I sat on the edge of the couch. He grinned as I stared at his manly, well-defined, movie star features. He stammered, unable to read the poem aloud. Maybe it was the wine, maybe it was his nerves, or maybe he just didn’t think he could do justice to Pablo Neruda’s poem, I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You. He shoved the book forcibly into my cleavage and I took it from him, as his hand fell into my lap.

  “Read it,” he ordered in the way he might order a roast beef sandwich at a deli. I read it slowly, uncertain of the words, and as I did, tears welled in my eyes. I felt so inexperienced, reading of the deep love that Pablo Neruda must have known.

  The movie actor touched the skin on my exposed breasts. His hands were rough, like a construction workers, but I didn’t mind.

  “Makes you want to find that?” he asked, not waiting for an answer, “It’s a risk; screwing is a whole lot easier, give me the book back,” he said, and I did.

  He tore the poem out of it, discarding the weathered book of selected poems onto the rug. He took the page with Neruda’s poem on it, folded it, and stuffed it between my breasts. Then he sat up and kissed me on my lips. I almost blurted, “I’m not on a 24b-up,” but I didn’t. I kept my silly, inexperienced worries to myself and kissed him back as if I was in a movie.

  The incessant banging on the latched door ended our kiss. He got up, unlatched it, and sauntered out. He had that ‘walk’, that commands attention.

  I found the Tennis Actor by the pool under an elaborate ‘safari tent’ that had been created for the party. He was high as a dustball blowing in a tornado. He grinned at me, as he lifted his leg.

  “Vivien, pull off my sock and scratch my foot,” he said, and I did.

  7

  ANSWER

  I had to wait a month for the answer to my destiny. It wasn’t what I thought it would be, but I accepted it. There’s always another shade, when at first it all seems bleak and desolate.

  “Your Aunt Helen’s dying and she wants you to visit her; she’s been asking to see you. To say her goodbye,” said my workaholic, academic father. His tone was dry, that of a man used to lots of family deaths, his sister being the last of his siblings.

  “Sure, I’ll pack up and come East. I needed a reason to leave La-La land,” I said.

  “I don’t think you have to give up your LA life and all that,” he said in his usual style of pushing me away.

  “I haven’t got an LA life worth holding onto, if you want to hear my truth,” I said.

  He was silent. “Then I guess I’ll see you soon,” he replied.

  “Yes, you will,” I said, and hung up.

  It didn’t take me five minutes to start packing, while Coldplay’s Fix You song blasted on my portable CD player. It was easy to get moving boxes from Craigslist free section. What hadn’t I found, brought or sold off of that mega-classified dot com site? I took digital photos of my very soft bed, my Ikea desk and Ikea futon couch, my porch picnic table and the four chairs. The Tennis Actor showed up when I was halfway done, not a difficult accomplishment in a studio apartment.

  “Where are you going? Are you leaving me?” he asked.

  “My Aunt Helen’s dying; I’ve got to go to Boston. She needs to see me,” I said without looking up.

  “I need you, I want you here,” he said, as if we were part of a soap opera.

  “You just signed a contract for a dream acting job, not everyone gets to do that. Meanwhile I’m doing nothing here. If I leave now, maybe I can become an indie filmmaker back in New York, I don’t know. All I do know is that I’m rotting away,” I said, without any great emotion.

  “I want you with me, doesn’t that count?” he asked, as if he wanted to force himself to cry.

  “Hollywood has your back covered; they want you. Not me! We’ve had great sex, but I’m not your soulmate, you and I both know that,” I said, speaking the truth out loud for once, without blame. After all, love’s a two-way thing.

  I had never spoken so straightforwardly; it was as if the words had been packed in the back corners of my mind waiting to pounce, waiting to be let out. Freedom!

  “You’re my girlfriend,” he said, as if that had been a fact all along. But I knew I wasn’t that important to him. Sure, I was the only one he was sleeping with and spending every day with, but he had never even suggested that he wanted more with me.

  “You wanted friendship with benefits, you said that after we slept together for the first time,” I said.

  I was trying to remind him about what had happened five months ago. “Things have changed,” he answered, as if that was all he could think of. Shadow watched us, making sure we weren’t arguing. What a dog! Shadow’s very sensitive to loud voices and the tone of anger. Then again, so am I.

  “It’s okay,” I said to Shadow, only the Tennis Actor thought I was talking to him. So he pouted, and then kicked the wall, but not hard. He threw a plastic cup, and then sat down and punched the air and I watched. Good acting is good acting, and a private scene is always a compliment. When he was done, he pulled me onto my bed—which was currently listed for sale online, but I didn’t stop him. He was intense, ripping my bra and my ‘peace’ labeled underwear off, as if the thought of not seeing me again made him extra horny and extra attentive. He was the kind of guy who took to my nipples like a teething newborn.

  Sometimes I just give in. I’m easy. I’m a simple slut, and this was one of those times. Hell, I had spent years on-and-off being single, years on-and-off hoping some guy would really want me. A good penis had been, at one time in my life, like looking for Godot and my quest hadn’t been easy.

  There’d been the guy at Vassar College that I met while visiting my friend Leah Bloom in Poughkeepsie. He had curly blonde hair, an open face with kiss-able intellectual lips, and a really academic mind that I wanted to lie next to, that I had wanted to listen to day and night. He had asked Leah for my phone number and she told me he was going to call, I waited and waited; I think I waited two months. Incidentally I never bothered going back up to Poughkeepsie. Pathetic is pathetic, and I once was. Of course, my friend Leah told me it was probably for the best; God’s prevention.

  And I had had crushes on three no-wins who shall go by commercial titles, as in ‘Mister Clean,’ the ‘Jolly Green Giant’, and the dancing ‘Dr. Pepper’. Mister C. had been the super cute, Chace Crawford type in high school who I had slam danced with, locked eyes with, and who had caused my hips to move in his direction without my mind knowing what they were doing. I swear my hips moved without me thinking about it. Yeah, I was into punk and he had great introspective eyes. He had been too shy to respond to my failed love letters, handwritten (ha, ha) and left wedged in his locker. FYI, never write a guy a lusty letter, because guys chase girls. So I didn’t get to screw him, and out of that ‘rejection’ I screwed a guy I didn’t really know in a closet at a party. Go figure! Yeah, it’s possible to screw fast, hard and without love. I learned later, after graduation, that Mister C. had regretted not going out with me. Double Ugh.

  Jolly G. G. was a guy who had been at sea, and hadn’t been laid in a long, long time (over a year). I met him at a New Year’s party at the South Street Seaport in Manhattan and he begged to come home with me, so I let him. He was tall, (a Paul Walker type), and filled with stories of having sailed half the globe. And he was from Martha’s Vineyard. Okay, so it’s true; don’t go to bed with a guy you don’t know. The sex was great; it always is with a man who hasn’t been laid in a really long time. Let’s just say every inch of my flesh was kissed, stroked, and appreciated. He said the usual, “I’ll call you, I want to see you again!” and yeah, I waited by the phone. I started daydreaming about weekends going to Martha’s Vineyard from Manhattan just to be with him. Three months later ‘I got it’, as in ONE NIGHT STANDS ARE STUPID!

  And last but not least, Dr. Pep,
who was my fault; I blew it. Dr. Pep and I met during a college summer program and we danced to Prince’s hit song, Delirious. He was (a Viggo Mortensen type), rugged in a casual way, and ‘true blue,’ as in he told the truth, he hadn’t been corrupted yet. But I was in one of those ‘I don’t deserve a good guy’ phases and pushed him away. My bad! My mistake! Some girls get lucky: it’s one guy and they’re set for life, or it’s a few and then they’re set for life, but for me, it’s a total loaded crap shoot.

  So here I was with this good-looking Tennis Actor gliding in and out between my legs. There is a God!

  But my Aunt Helen had been the one who taught me to believe again, after my manic depressive mom ran away when I turned fifteen. My mom used to be an activities director at a senior center—basically she chose fun things for the seniors to do. She’s mildly dyslexic, as in not as much as me. She met a cook at a burrito joint in Porter Square not far from the senior center, who was moving back to Panama to start a coffee plantation, and he invited her to join him. The ‘love’ story goes that the Panamanian man had started shaking when he sat across from my mother, that he felt his heart pounding and couldn’t help but tell her, “My heart beats for you,” in broken English. She was so struck by his natural, pure way of speaking, she practically drooled. He had about a year of English under his belt, a slow year, and it moved her to tears. So she packed up her stuff and headed off with him, promising to keep in touch with me and my workaholic, academic, father.

  Only a few half-page letters came now and then, and my Aunt Helen said, “You have two choices: number one, blame your mother, get down in the dumps and be a victim of loss, or number two, forgive her, grow up, and create a joyful life of your own.”

  She was like that, always tossing the coin up. If the toss ended up heads, it was, “I’ll volunteer today,” tails it was, “I’ll make something interesting.” Those were her typical choices. My Aunt Helen had sewn words of inspiration across my jeans and on a winter jacket and a raincoat.

  “Your mother couldn’t spend her whole life with an academic. She had a quest to fulfill herself, and she did her best with the family for as long as she could. And that’s all you can judge her on,” my Aunt Helen had said, just before I went off to college to be crazy and wild. And it was because of her that I moved to Los Angeles.

  I had already graduated from college, only to end up working as a waitress at Dojo’s in the East Village and an usher at BAMM, and as a tarot card reader at upscale holiday parties, where I promised the world for a flat fee of a $130.00 per party. I’d always get the females—the confessional types worried about their marriages, their boyfriends, their girlfriends, and their careers. I would just flip the cards and say stuff like, “You’re a high priestess and the rods spells out adoring love approaching; get ready for the best passion in bed of your life,” if that’s what she was worried about. If it was health, I’d turn the coin images up, to show healing and the circle of life, and with career concerns, I’d lay it on thick, “The cards showed hardship and suffering, but now they reveal the rebirth of financial bliss, the promise of continued opportunity, even a Swiss bank account, blah, blah.” They would return to the party with their heads high, their shoulders straight and I could tell that they believed me.

  I had had Aunt Helen sew the word “BELIEVE” down the right thigh of my favorite pair of black dress pants. I wore a burgundy Indian cloth around my head and a black silk blouse, all because I had met a Gypsy girl named Nancy on 14th Street who told me I had fortune teller eyes, and that party gigs were a quick way to make extra cash and that people always tipped. There was no resume needed, and she and her mother taught me tricks, like how to moan as if a vision was coming up my foot into my eyeballs; how to sigh; how to ask what was wrong without sounding fake.

  I made a vow on the flight from New York to Los Angeles to never, ever read tarot cards or tea leaves or palms again. I had kept my promise until the Tennis Actor stared at me with that, ‘you’re abandoning me’ look—the one that previously I gave to guys. So I found myself picking up his left hand and rubbing his palm, and saying, “The doctor TV show is going to give you all you want and need, just stay open.” And then he said, “Shut up, I’m going to miss you.” And a lump came up in my throat. No one ever tells you how to get rid of that kind of a lump, but I tried to swallow it away. FYI, emotional lumps can’t be swallowed. Sometimes moments end like this, and there’s no movie director around to shout, “CUT, SCENE CHANGE!”

  8

  GOING

  Going forward with my decision to leave LA was what I had to do for my Aunt Helen. It wasn’t that I couldn’t have stored my stuff, what with all the local ‘first month free’ storage places—it was just that I knew, somewhere inside me, that I was moving away—maybe not permanently, but at least for a few years, or, then again, maybe for good. I felt a mix of excitement along with the fear of leaving my LA friends, my LA acting career, and my LA way of life. Added onto that was guilt, guilt for leaving a guy I wasn’t deeply in love with, but whom I had grown fond of being with. Ugh!

  Okay not easy to do, but if I was to find my own Mr. Darcy (AKA Romeo) and a career less built on someone else saying, “yes” to me, then I had to go. There were a few days when I wished I could have found an open-24-hours-shrink—maybe they have those in Las Vegas. The trouble was I kept having ‘abandonment issues’ and pangs in my stomach. The Tennis Actor didn’t bring it up, but he looked at me like I was leaving because of him, which I wasn’t. At least I don’t think I was! So he came over every night to screw the longest goodbye over and over again. Better than the way most movies end. Go figure!

  And by the end of week, UPS had shipped all of my boxes to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to my father’s cluttered, two-bedroom apartment, which was wall-to-wall books in every room—books he actually had read.

  Shadow and I stayed with the Tennis Actor for our last Hollywood night, while he looked over sides for his TV show part. The landlord was relieved that I was moving out because he could now raise the rent. After all, Los Feliz had rapidly become the trendy place to live.

  I gave my beat-up Volvo with about a year left on it to a woman who was raising two kids without child support. I had put an ad on Craigslist to drive somebody’s car back East and by perfect fate, which is always the case with that site, I got not just any car, but a super stylish red BMW. Hell, Craigslist should have been paying me yearly to do commercials for them, or at least radio spots. The site is amazing. The BMW belonged to an up-an-coming fashion designer who needed it driven to New Haven, Connecticut, to her parents’ house. Oh, of course I lied about Shadow and told her, “Yeah, I’m driving across the country all alone.” Naturally, I bought a few drop cloths from Home Depot and covered the backseat with them and for all intents and purposes it worked: no mutt hair landed on the seats or in the plush panels.

  The morning before I drove off, the Tennis Actor booked his fourth national commercial.

  “I’m going to really miss you,” he said, with his arms stretched around me like we were in a shampoo commercial.

  “Yeah, for maybe a month, until some sexy guest actress arrives and you fall hard for her,” I said.

  “Vivien, you might not want to believe this, but I like you and if you would stay in LA, I would live with you. We’d rent a new place. You’re good luck for me,” he said.

  Not much you can say when someone wants you and you’ve always wanted to be wanted. And you also realize that they like you in bed, which just adds ‘icing’ on the relationship. Maybe sex is a metaphor for icing. I couldn’t open my mouth, because it was time to go and that suddenly hurt. I could have borrowed a good-bye movie line, but instead I said, “You’d better become a major, Emmy-winning actor, so I can beat myself up daily with regret.” I tried kicking my ass to illustrate my remorse. After a long kiss, a pat on the butt—him patting my butt and then me patting his, I drove over to my agent Ray’s office.

  Ray was in; he had his back to the door an
d he was packing boxes.

  “So, you’re walking out on me? What about my Academy Award?” I asked, with a smirk on my face.

  Ray turned, gave me his famous Italian-American hug and started explaining “I’m done here. I gotta get out of show biz, but you, Vivien, got fat talent, fat talent,” he said. I plunked myself down in his desk chair and swiveled around.

  “Ray, no worries, I’m going back East, so don’t think a thing; I was just teasing you.”

  Ray had represented, among others, Aldo and his late son, the actor Alonzo, and he liked to talk about it—the story goes that Coppola was seeking Italian-American actors for his Godfather movie. Ray submitted them both, since Aldo was fluent in Italian and Alonzo wasn’t. Coppola asked Alonzo all sorts of questions, while Aldo had to watch. Later that day Ray got the call; Alonzo had booked himself a movie part. He shot his scene opposite Robert De Niro. Aldo was ecstatic for his son.

  Incidentally Ray no longer managed them, but they stayed friends. The last time I saw them both was a month before Alonzo died. He and his father were in a four-door classic Cadillac. Alonzo was behind the steering wheel, and pulled to the curb, so they could say hello to me. They had that authentic father and son bond, absolute love and respect for each other. Not everyone gets that in life. I felt the urge to jump in and hang out with them for the day; to soak up their affection. To ask for life lessons.

  Ray took me to Alonzo’s memorial at the Writers Guild Theater on Doheny Drive in Beverly Hills. “That was some memorial, a lot of laughs,” Ray said, reading my mind, which was easy because I was staring at photos of Alonzo and Aldo on Ray’s wall. “Alonzo knew how to befriend anyone and everyone,” I said.

  “You’re good at friendship, too, Vivien,” he said, like he thought I needed validating. All of sudden I felt like crying, like breaking down and sobbing uncontrollably, but fortunately Ray interrupted my thoughts.