Adulation (10 page)

“Me? No.”

He studied her features, mentally tracing each contour as if trying to memorize them, resisting the urge to invite her for a cup of coffee, blow off the film premiere and the Q&A and go somewhere and talk for hours. He pulled his jacket closed and leaned forward.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

For a split second, she wore a bemused expression; then, just as she opened her mouth, a guy in a black leather jacket and black pants approached them from the opposite direction, talking loudly on his

phone in a heavy Brooklyn accent, and stopped when he saw Danny, barely pausing for breath.

“Holy shit, Joey. Danny Fuckin’ Masters is standin’ right in front of me. You know who that is?

Hey Danny,
 
Glengarry Glen Ross
 
is my favorite movie.”

“Thanks, I didn’t write that one,” said Danny.

“No? Well, you shoulda.”

At that moment, Danny and the woman exchanged complicit glances before he turned back to the

goon.

“I couldn’t agree more,” he said, unable to contain the smile cajoled not by him, but her.

“Anyway, I only know who you are ’cause of Charlene Dumont. Hey Danny, you’re bangin’ my girl, know what I’m sayin’?” said the goon, making a lewd motion with his fist and laughing. Meanwhile Danny mourned the prematurely crushed cigarette.

“Well, there’s a Gershwin song for you.”

Danny’s attention shot back to the woman, who’d uttered the crack barely loud enough for him to hear it, and he burst out laughing. She put her hand to her mouth and stifled a giggle of her own when she realized he’d heard her.

“I’m tellin’ ya,” the goon continued obliviously, “she is smokin’ hot.”

“Yes, she is,” Danny said, deadpan, his eyes locked into a gaze with the woman’s.
 
Dammit, what is her name...

“Hold on, Joey. Hey Danny, let me get a pic wit-chuh. I ain’t never gotten my picktch taken with no director before. Here, sweetheart,” said the goon, practically tossing his phone to the woman, his buddy Joey still presumably on the line, “take a picktch.”

The woman flinched and caught the phone. Danny begrudgingly let the elusive Joey’s friend lean in and extend his arm around him in one fell swoop. He looked at her behind the phone, yearning to pose with her instead, wondering if he should make the request to do so.

“I think I got it,” she said.

“Thanks. Now, if you’ll excuse me, my break’s over, and I gotta get back inside,” he said to the

goon.

But before Danny could ask her to stay for just one more minute, the goon said, “Wait, we gotta doit again. You weren’t lookin’ right.”

Just as he did so, the woman said, “It was nice to meet you,” and she hurried away.

“Hang on,” Danny called out, but she’d already turned the corner. He wanted to follow her, butjust as the goon  extended the phone out for another picture of them, the door opened and Paul Wolf calledto Danny.

“We need you,” he said.

“OK,” he said to Paul. And then, to the goon, “Thanks, but I really gotta go now.” He wasimpatient, even irked, as he opened the door and ducked back into the theater, hearing the goon shouting, “Hey, you ain’t fuckin’ Al Pacino, ya know. Show some respect. Can you believe this guy, Joey?”

Danny pushed his hair back, rubbed his eyes, and exhaled a deep, forceful breath as Paul greetedhim backstage a second time. “That was a quick smoke.”

Danny seemed surprised. “Was it?” He checked his watch to find that not more than five minuteshad passed.

“Yeah, you OK? Doesn’t look like it helped much.”

As Paul said the words, Danny felt the pang in his lungs for more nicotine. Wistfully he lookedback at the door and wished to be on the other side of it.

“No,” he said. “It didn’t.”

CHAPTER SIX

Sunny Smith

“Y
O U
 
WHAT
?” SAID
 
Georgie and Theo in unison when I returned to the line, which had sprouted like a beanstalk in the short time I’d left it.

“Shhh,” I said. “I don’t want the world to know.”

“Seriously? He was just standing there, taking a smoke break,” Georgie said more like a statement than a question.

“I didn’t know he still smoked,” said Theo.

“What did he say to you?” asked Georgie.

“I honestly don’t remember,” I replied. That wasn’t entirely true; I remembered being startled to see him standing there, a previously two-dimensional image come to life. I remembered him not shaking my hand so much as
 
holding
 
it, his hand warm, not too big or overpowering. I remembered him asking me what my name was and my mind going blank. I remembered the way he looked at me, right when the Tony Soprano wannabe said “smokin’ hot.” I remembered his eyes: red, weary, trying to avoid the sun. I remembered feeling like we’d just exchanged a key to each other’s hearts, unlocking them for mere seconds and getting a sneak peek. I saw loneliness in those mere seconds. I saw wanting. I saw a friend and—what was the  word he used?—a
 
compatriot
, someone who came from the same place as me.

OK, so I remembered plenty.

“It was, like, two minutes ago!” said Georgie, exasperated.

“It happened pretty fast.”

“What did you say to him?” asked Theo.

I’d always imagined what I would actually say if or when I finally came face to face with Danny Masters:
 
You’re my favorite writer of all time? I studied your writing style the way art students studythe Impressionists? Hey, I’m divorced too?

I mean, what could anyone possibly say to Danny Masters that he hadn’t already heard?

“Something really stupid about him smoking,” I replied, mentally kicking myself. Come to think ofit, pretty much everything I said warranted a mental ass-kicking with a steel shoe.

“That’s it?” asked Georgie.

“Some guy came over and monopolized the conversation, so I left.”

Georgie’s mouth dropped open. “Are you
 
crazy
?” he practically shouted.

“Clearly I had nothing of value to say.” Another lie. I wanted to tell him
 
everything
 
at thatmoment, wanted to tell him my whole life story and ask him about his, wanted to share my deepestsecrets. But every time I opened my mouth, it all went into hiding. I had grown up having never been at aloss for words. Not until Teddy humiliated me and I’d lost the ability to speak up for myself. Even mywriting had become stunted since then, for I had become an unreliable narrator. Having gotten marriedwith the wool pulled over my eyes, and having spent the last ten years of my life shut away in astockroom, how could I trust that what I’d seen and felt at that moment with Danny was real?

Besides, if I told Georgie that Danny Masters had asked me for my name and I’d not given it to him

because of a momentary spaz-out, he very well might have disowned me.

“Um, hel-lo? Your name? Marital status? Phone number? E-mail address?”

“Then he would’ve thought I was some creepy stalker fan. Look, I was nothing more than a passerby during a smoke break, that’s all,” I said, rationalizing this for me more than for my friends. “I’m sure that if he had to describe me to a sketch artist, he’d have no clue.”

“Given the way you look?” said Georgie. “I highly doubt it.”

“I’m siding with Georgie on this one,” said Theo. “You look so smokin’ right now. There’s no way any guy wouldn’t notice you.”

The compliment made me uncomfortable. The last thing I’d wanted was to be noticed. And once I washed all that makeup off and took off the fancy clothes, what would be left to see? What was underneath?

“What did he look like?” asked Georgie.

“He looked...”

We couldn’t have been standing on that sidewalk for more than a few minutes. However, I had recorded every detail as if I’d studied him in a museum for an hour. He looked shorter in person (such a clichéd thing to say), just a few inches taller than me, which I liked. (Teddy was over six feet tall, and I’d had to strain my neck to kiss him.) He  was wearing his hair longer than usual these days, and I suspected it was because he’d been too busy to have it cut rather than setting some fashion precedent. Not a trace of gray (although for some reason I had never previously considered that Danny Masters colored his hair, but when living in a youth-obsessed town, not coloring his hair would be unusual behavior, I guessed). But Danny Masters would look good with gray hair. He looked handsome, but rugged and rumpled, like the stereotypical writer, wearing jeans and Doc Martens and a wrinkled button-down shirt with mismatched sports jacket, and five o’clock shadow.

And yet that’s not what I saw when I recalled those few minutes with him. He’d mentioned the hectic day, not having had a moment to himself, smoking under stress, and suddenly I realized that I hadn’t just met a celebrity, despite the media and society telling me that’s what he was. He was someone else— someone much more familiar to me, yet invisible to the world.

“Tired,” I replied.

“God, Sunny, I can’t believe it,” said Theo. “You just met Danny Masters.”

“Who met Danny Masters?” said someone in the line.

“She did,” said Georgie and Theo in stereo, pointing to me. I wanted to bop their heads together like the Three Stooges.

“When?”

“Just now, around the corner.”

Three people left the line to go look for him, and I found myself calling after them, trying to explain that it wasn’t like he was just hanging out around the corner, waiting to be seen. They returned just as quickly and  reported back. “He wasn’t there. Are you sure it was him?” As if I’d made it up.

The theater doors finally opened around five forty-five and we entered, handing over our tickets and making a beeline for the front rows. It would be awkward to view the film when sitting so close to the screen, but Georgie and Theo both wanted a glimpse of Shane Sands and insisted that I be in viewing range of Danny Masters, in case he noticed me.

“Right. ’Cause he’s gonna stop in midsentence, point to me, and say, ‘Dude, I know that girl.’”

If only!

“Stranger things have happened,” said Georgie.

We wound up smack in the middle of the second row, so close that someone onstage would be able to get a whiff of Georgie’s cologne or be distracted by Theo’s salmon-pink cashmere scarf. I caught myself leaning forward and craning my neck in the direction of the side exit, trying to get a glimpse of

anyone who might be lurking there, watching the audience amble in, chattering and texting and taking pictures with their smartphones. I knew who I was looking for, hoping to see, but no one was there.

Finally the moderator, a film professor at NYU, took the stage and introduced the film and its stars

—Shane Sands, Sharon Blake, director Paul Wolf, and, of course, screenwriter Danny Masters, who had changed into a new shirt (albeit just as wrinkled) and sports jacket. The five o’clock shadow was gone. They all waved to the audience, and I desperately tried to telepathically get his attention. Georgie, as if he had picked up on my brain waves, took  matters into his own hands by putting his fingers between his lips and letting out a whistle that nearly blew out my eardrum. I elbowed him in the arm and he yelped. “Ow! You made me bite my finger.”

“You made me go deaf,” I retorted.

Worse still, it didn’t seem to have worked.

The stars left the stage, the lights dimmed, drawing shushes from the audience, and for the next two-and-a-half hours I was swept away into Danny Masters’s world, where I was happy to be.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Danny Masters