Little Known Facts: A Novel (35 page)
“I heard that you and Elise broke up a little while after the Oscars.”
He hesitated. “Yes, we did.”
“I was sorry to hear that.”
“Thanks,” he said flatly. He sounded tired, his usual bluffness when we spoke on the phone, rare as our conversations were these days, absent. I felt a little guilty about grilling him, but I wanted to know what was going on, if he had gone out with Billy’s ex-girlfriend, if he was still going out with her.
“Are you seeing someone new?” I said.
He let a few seconds pass before answering. “No, not really.”
“I’m seeing someone,” I murmured. I hadn’t intended to tell him this, but his reticence was annoying me, even though I had no right to any kind of disclosure from him anymore.
“You are?” he said, waking up a little. “Do I know him?”
“You used to.” I paused. “It’s Michael Kinicki.”
“Who?”
“Michael Kinicki. We were friends with him for a little while at USC. You remember him, don’t you? You thought he had a crush on me.”
“Was he the guy who dated your roommate and always left his dirty underwear in the bathroom after he took a shower? Didn’t he also carry around a corncob pipe and say it was his grandfather’s?”
“I don’t remember him carrying a corncob pipe. I don’t think he left his underwear in our bathroom either.” I remembered the pipe but not the underwear.
“He did. You used to complain about it too.”
I didn’t reply.
After a moment, Renn said, “What’s he doing now?”
“He’s an attorney. Immigration law.”
“Oh. How long have you been seeing him?”
“Not very long.”
“Well, good for you.”
“You need to call your children,” I said.
“I will,” he said.
“Tomorrow.”
“Lucy.”
“Yes?” I said. Just like that, I felt nervous. I recognized his tone as the one he had used the few times he had confessed to cheating on me.
“Billy isn’t going to want to talk to me if he finds out that his ex-girlfriend is living with me right now. That’s one of the reasons I haven’t called him or Anna lately.”
“What? Do you mean Danielle?” I said, my voice rising involuntarily. “Why is she living with you? She has her own place, doesn’t she?”
“She does,” he said slowly, “but if I tell you something, I don’t want you to talk about it with anyone else, not Anna or Billy or Michael Kinicki. No one. I’m not kidding.”
“You can tell me,” I said, even more nervous now.
“I can’t be alone anymore, not at my house. Since Elise and I broke up, I haven’t been able to sleep unless I take pills, but I’m all right if someone is there with me. I wake up in the middle of the night if I’m by myself and feel like I’m about to have a panic attack. The first few times this happened, I took some Valium, but I didn’t want to have to keep taking it because it was happening almost every night. Danielle has been accommodating. She’s a very kind person.”
“Is she with you in New Orleans right now?”
“No. I don’t have as much trouble when I travel. Oddly enough.”
“You’re going to have to tell Billy soon if you intend to keep her there for any period of time.”
“I know.”
“You should probably tell him right away. He seems happy with his new girlfriend, and he loves Paris. I don’t know if he’ll take it that hard.”
“I think he would. We had some trouble over Elise, and things between us are still pretty shaky.”
“I know. But you still need to tell him soon. Ask Isis what she thinks,” I say, letting a note of derision enter my tone. “I’m sure she’d agree with me.”
He falters. “Are you mad at me, Lucy?”
“I might be after you talk to Billy, depending on how he handles it, but right now I’m not.”
“Professionally, everything is better than it’s ever been for me, but somehow I keep fucking up my personal life.”
“It doesn’t help if you have an affair with your son’s ex-girlfriend while you’re supposed to be in a monogamous relationship with one of the prettiest girls in Hollywood, who also happens to be younger than your own daughter.”
“I know,” he said morosely. “But I can’t seem to stop myself from acting like an asshole.”
“More therapy,” I said. “Or try castration.”
“You’re not funny,” he said, laughing anyway. “Speaking of Anna, have you met her friend yet?”
“Her boyfriend?”
“If that’s what you want to call him.”
I froze. “What does that mean?”
Renn hesitated. Maybe he felt bad about telling me something that he knew would upset me, but I doubted it. He was probably only trying to figure out how to deliver his bad news with the greatest dramatic effect. “He’s married,” he said. “I suppose she didn’t tell you that.”
My stomach dropped. “He is?”
“Yes.”
Goddamn it,
I thought.
Goddamn it, Anna.
“She told me he wasn’t,” I finally said.
“Well, I guess she lied to you.”
“Yes, I guess she did.” I paused. “She told me that you met him. What did you think?”
“I liked him. He’s very charming. If he weren’t someone else’s husband, I’d say that he and Anna might be a good match.”
“How old is he?”
“A lot older than she is.”
Wonderful, I thought. Another aging philanderer shopping for sex in a much younger age bracket. What a surprise. “How much older?”
“About twenty years, I think.”
“Jesus.”
“Exactly.”
We really screwed things up, I wanted to say. No, forget that. What I wanted to say was,
You
really screwed things up. But I said nothing. I was hurt and angry, my daughter having told me a bald-faced lie to hide the fact that she was carrying on an illicit affair with a man who was supposed to be mentoring her, with a man who was not supposed to be taking advantage of the pretty young interns who were entrusted to him for one of the most crucial periods of their formation as physicians. I wanted to drive to wherever this opportunist lived and spit on his shoes.
But even more than this, I wanted to flee to Michael’s house and walk straight into his arms and not have to face the truth of what my faithless ex-husband had just revealed about our lovely and intelligent daughter, our precious second-born, the last child we would ever have together. I didn’t care if Michael had once carried around his grandfather’s corncob pipe or left his dirty underwear in Karen’s and my bathroom. We were all of twenty-one when we’d first known each other, innocent of most of the frustrations that life would eventually deliver to us, unaware of most other people’s sorrows, and so arrogant in our attempts to take over the world, to make an impression on someone other than our most willing admirers, if we had any admirers to speak of.
I said good-bye to Renn and went into my bedroom and lay down on the bed in the dark. What I wanted, I realized then, was a Hollywood ending. Every single day, I wanted a Hollywood ending with its hero who saves the people he loves from their worst fears, whether it be violent death via nuclear bomb or murderer’s gun, or a lonely death after a life lived in fear of romantic humiliation. There are countless ways to be unhappy, so many more, it seems to me, than ways to be happy, which could be one of the reasons why happiness is so elusive. If there are ten million ways to be miserable, there are maybe a million ways to be the opposite, if we’re lucky.
Renn, with his global reputation for being a Good Samaritan now that Life After the Storm has been successfully launched, with his acting talent and many awards and beautiful lovers and millions and millions in the bank, somehow has managed not to be happy. Our children, despite their own talents and good fortune, also seem to be struggling, though Billy appears to be happier than he has been in a long time, and for this I am grateful.
The choices we make and the choices that we allow to be made for us: these are the raw materials that compose our lives. Some days it feels to me as if I am stepping out of a dark theater into the brilliant sun of early afternoon—for a few moments I can’t see anything, and when my ghostly surroundings start to reclaim a more corporeal form, I worry that they won’t be recognizable. Because at times, they aren’t.
I can only hope that I have loved the people closest to me more than I have harmed them. This is something, however, that I don’t think anyone can know for sure.
Lisa Bankoff at ICM, Nancy Miller at Bloomsbury, and Sheryl Johnston: if it weren’t for you, this book would live nowhere but on the hard drive of my soon-to-be-obsolete laptop. Thank you for your kindness, generosity, and extraordinary guidance.
David Elliott: writer, friend, Hollywood sage—thank you for finding the time in your dawn-’til-dusk schedule to offer your expert advice and critique.
Cara Blue Adams, Stephen Donadio, and Carolyn Kuebler: you have offered me and many other writers the professional and spiritual equivalent of life support.
Thank you to everyone at Higgins Lake for letting me hide out in the bedroom to work on the last two chapters: Adam, Marilyn Berling, Sarah Walz, Andy Tinkham, Amy Tinkham, and Eric Stromer.
Paul and Linae Luehrs, Kate Ellis, Tony Ellis, Gary Kaufman, Melissa Fraterrigo, Pete Seymour: thank you for answering my many technical questions.
Adam McOmber and Chrissy Kolaya—thank you for listening (and for laughing, often).
Thank you, friends and family: Melanie Brown, Dolores Walker, Denise Simons, Noelle Neu, Elizabeth Eck, Kate Soehren, Dorthe Andersen, Melissa Spoharski, Leonard Sneed, Ann and Tom Tennery, Dave Wieczorek, Mark Turcotte, Bill Fahrenbach, Alison Umminger, Gregory Fraser, Mike Levine, Paulette Livers, Debby Parker, Ruth Hutchison, Kim Brun, Kathleen Rooney, Francis-Noel Thomas, Jane Goldenberg, Angela Pneuman, Laura Durnell, Michelle Plasz, Robin Bluestone-Miller, Anita Gewurz, Meredith Ferrill, Cindy Martin, Marlene Garrison, Mona Oommen, Melissa Underwood, Melanie Feerst, Lauren Klopack, Dave Ramont, Dave Sills, and the magnificent Mr. (Bill) Weber.
And thank you to my parents, Susan Sneed and Terry Webb. Persistence, joy: two of the many things that I’ve learned from you.
Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry
Christine Sneed
has a creative writing MFA from Indiana University and has lived in Chicago and Evanston, Illinois, since 1998. She teaches creative writing at DePaul University, Northwestern University, and Pacific University. Her story collection,
Portraits of a Few of the People I’ve Made Cry,
won AWP’s 2009 Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, First Fiction category, was named the Chicago Writer’s Association Book of the Year, and has been chosen as the recipient of Ploughshares’ 2011 first-book prize, the John C. Zacharis Award. It was also long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and named one of the seven best books of the year by
Time Out Chicago.
Her stories have appeared or are forthcoming in
Best American Short Stories, PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories, Ploughshares, Southern Review, Massachusetts Review, New England Review, Notre Dame Review,
and a number of other journals. Visit her website at
http://www.christinesneed.com
.
Copyright © 2013 by Christine Sneed
This electronic edition published in February 2013
All rights reserved.
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce, or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
Chapter 1, “Relations,” appeared in
The Southern Review
38, no. 1, Winter 2012; chapter 2, “Flattering Light,” appeared in
The Southern Review
38, no. 2, Spring 2012; chapter 4, “The Finest Medical Attention,” appeared in
New England Review
33, no. 1, 2012.
Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Sneed, Christine, 1971—
Little known facts : a novel / Christine Sneed.—1st U.S. ed.
p. cm.
1. Actors—Fiction. 2. Celebrities—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3619.N523L58 2013
813’.6—dc23 2012034227
First U.S. Edition 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60819-968-6 (e-book)