The First Assistant (18 page)

“No. You’re injured and you need to get out of the sun. You don’t want that bleeding foot to attract sharks now, do you?”

I wasn’t sure if he was serious or not, but I had a pathological fear of sharks ever since watching
Jaws
with a babysitter one night when I was nine. So instead of fighting to get down I literally lifted every bit of my body out of the water in horror.

“There aren’t really sharks here, are there?” We’d just made it to dry land.

“Yeah, but I’d have saved you.”

How can you not fall in love instantly with a man who just wants to

save you all the time? I know it’s a cliché, but I so desperately needed to be saved. From what, I don’t know, but I’d been so obsessed with tak-ing care of Emerald for the last month I’d barely thought of myself for a second. And here was this sexy man holding me in his arms, carrying me across the hot sand, and all I could think of was how much I’d like to roll around in it with him.

I squealed with delight as he started walking away from the Amanpuri. “Where are you taking me?”

“You don’t think us lowly members of the crew get to stay at the Aman, do you?” I hadn’t even thought about it actually. I was whisked to and from the set every morning and evening with Emerald so I didn’t see the rest of the crew coming and going each day. I hadn’t noticed anyone other than Ken, Carmen, Kathy, Fred, and Emerald and me at the Amanpuri. I’d just assumed everyone else hung out somewhere fun that I simply wasn’t invited to. That was usually how it went.

“I’m going to show you a bit of the island. Though the Aman is incredible, judging from the color of your skin you haven’t tasted much local flavor since you’ve been in Thailand.”

“But you’re not local.” I couldn’t believe I’d just said that, but Chris was bringing something out in me that I’d thought was dead and buried—my sense of fun!

The crew’s hotel was just down the beach from the Aman. In no way did it compare in beauty or luxury but it had the casual comforts of a well-lived-in home. The crew had taken over the entire hotel for the three months of the shoot, and many of them had been there for seven weeks of preproduction prior to the start date, building the sets, scout-ing, casting,
etc.
Chris and I went to his room first, where he sweetly applied aloe to my back without once letting his hand wander anywhere that wasn’t in need. He then lent me an oxford to cover my burn and I slipped into my shorts that I thankfully had tossed into my beach bag at the last minute earlier, and off we went. We walked down to the pool and I saw lots of familiar faces from the set. There was an easy camaraderie, like at a family Thanksgiving party. Chris introduced me to everyone and I made a real effort to try to remember their names. They all seemed to know exactly who I was, and I realized that I was really missing out. No one here was lonely. It was like a twenty-four-hour

party with some work in the middle. I obviously had the wrong job. I wondered if I could make a request to be moved to this hotel. A little trot down the beach would be just the space I needed from Emerald to make our relationship that much healthier. But who was I kidding? This was the first day we’d spent apart in a month. She wasn’t going to let me go anywhere, but at least I could enjoy the fantasy.

And I did enjoy it. It was like oxygen to a drowning man. Chris took me to a little local fish restaurant on a rocky beach up the coast and we talked endlessly about our lives. We drank enormous ice-cold Singha beers and sampled all the things on the menu we couldn’t translate. He was so easy to talk to, and though I’d only just met him, I felt like I’d known him all my life. I told him all about my job at The Agency, my confusion about what to do next in my career, my breakup with Luke, and he told me about where he grew up, his father’s death, and how he had started his company. He even confided in me his insecurities about being a grip. It was a predominately physical job and he felt people dis-counted his intelligence. I realized as I sat there playing with my chop-sticks that we had shared more intimate details about our lives than I had with Luke in the whole year we’d been together. I couldn’t quite fig-ure out if it was a flaw in my relationship with Luke or a false intimacy that forms from being in very close quarters away from your friends and family. Chris seemed to take the words right out of my mouth.

“Sorry. Probably too many personal details. It tends to happen on location. People are away from their usual support network so they form new ones out of human necessity, I guess,” he said, smiling easily.

“Yeah. This is my first time on location, but I think it’s nice. The new friends thing.” And it was. He was so straightforward and didn’t have a career that required everyone to kiss his derriere. He was just a normal guy who did a normal guy’s job. Yet he was intelligent, kind, and obviously had a strong sense of moral justice, which I hadn’t encountered very often since I’d been in Hollywood. Chris was seriously crushable. After dinner we walked down the beach back to my resort. It was a perfectly clear night and the stars seemed to be hovering just inches from the sand. A body-temperature breeze blew through the oxford shirt, cooling my sunburned body. I walked closer to the sea letting the cool water wash over my feet. Chris walked silently beside me, neither

of us feeling the need to fill the space with conversation. He reached out and took my hand in his. His hand was dry and warm and our fingers just seemed to knit together organically. It suddenly occurred to me that maybe this was how love was supposed to be. Maybe in any other town besides Hollywood or New York this is how it happened. Two people meet, have a connection, hold hands, and then live happily every after. Isn’t that what it said in all the fairy tales you were warped by as a little girl? I looked up into Chris’s handsome, open face and felt for a second that maybe there was still good in the world. It felt like a salve on my bruised heart, and though my skin was burning, the hot knot in my stomach seemed to ease just a little.

We arrived at my bungalow and there wasn’t even that awkward beat that comes with a first kiss. He just pulled me to him and kissed me in the most deliciously passionate way. It erased my memory, my reason, and possibly my good sense. Though my mind was a bit addled from the sheer force of my attraction, I couldn’t really come up with any grounds for why I shouldn’t be kissing this yummy man on this beautiful beach. Luke obviously didn’t care, and anyway he was kissing his own “perfect” woman. We kissed for a few more minutes against a palm tree.

“Think maybe we should take it inside?” Chris said casually. I couldn’t have agreed more.

“Hold on one second. I just have to check something.” I’d run out of the bungalow in such a daze this morning, I wanted to make sure that I hadn’t left dirty underpants sitting around or other equally girlie things that were bound to kill the mood. I kissed him and dashed inside.

I didn’t even bother turning on the lights as I grabbed piles of dirty clothes off the floor and shoved them into the closet. I quickly unwrapped the scented candle that sat by the bed. I couldn’t believe how fragrant it was. I hadn’t even lit it yet and the room smelled like a rose garden. I dug around for matches with no success, so I switched on the light to have a better look. And there on every available surface were beautiful bouquets of roses. They covered the entire spectrum of the rainbow: yellow, red, purple, coral, white. I couldn’t quite figure out how Emerald had managed to order flowers all by herself. She couldn’t even order room service without calling me first. Obviously she was feeling bad about her earlier behavior and wanted to make sure we were

still friends. I found the matches, lit the candle, and turned off the light. The flowers were so amazing and so over the top, I had to give it to Emerald for impressive gestures. I quickly squirted my perfume in all the important spots, yanked the card off the red roses, and opened it just as I was about to step out of my beautiful and now romantically candlelit bungalow. But I stopped dead in my tracks with one foot out the door as the little envelope dropped to the ground. The card read:

You’re a hard girl to track down, but then rare things always are. I miss you. Please can we talk. Love, Luke

I looked up in panic at Chris leaning against the palm tree and every ounce of romantic feeling drained from my body. Confusion reigned supreme. He looked up and must have caught the expression on my face. He motioned to the card in my hand.

“Bad news?” he asked gently.

I shook my head. “I don’t know. Listen, do you mind if we take a rain check? I . . .” I didn’t know what to say. Thankfully, Chris did. He walked over to me and kissed me chastely on the forehead.

“Lizzie, there’s absolutely no rush. You and I will have plenty of time to get to know each other. I don’t doubt that. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay? Get some sleep.” I smiled and gave him a little wave as his big frame turned and loped down the beach toward his hotel.

I walked back into my room, blew out the candle, and turned on the lights. I held the card in my hands and studied it. It wasn’t his writing, but it didn’t matter; I felt like he was in the room and I missed him more than I ever had before. I wanted to pick up the phone and hear his voice. I wanted to tell him all about Emerald and the crazy time I was having in Thailand. But then I remembered the picture of him kissing Emanuelle and then the silence. I slipped out of my clothes and climbed right into bed. I tried hard to think of Chris and the evening of anxiety-free pleasure we’d just spent. But images of Luke kept sneaking in from my subconscious. I squeezed my eyes tightly shut, trying to erase Luke’s face from my memory, but the smell of the roses just kept assaulting my senses, making it impossible for him not to dominate my dreams.

Eleven

Good-bye, Mr. Zanuck. It certainly has been a pleasure working

at 16th Century Fox.

—Jean Renoir

I woke the next morning feeling rejuvenated. I’d decided, in the hour of tossing and turning I’d done before I’d finally drifted off to sleep, that I didn’t need to deal with the Luke situation just yet. I wanted to revel in the pleasure of knowing that Luke still wanted me, yet avoid the inevitable pain and confrontation a discussion would require. A week or two wouldn’t make any difference, except hopefully make him suffer, and it was the perfect opportunity to explore things with Chris guilt free. Af-ter all, the picture of Luke and Emanuelle pretty much gave me carte blanche as far as I was concerned. I had a spring in my step as I got dressed in my best pair of shorts and favorite tank that Emerald had given me. It managed to create a bosom where not much existed. It was much more fun to drag yourself off to the set in the mornings if you knew you had a handsome boy to flirt with over eggs at the catering trailer.

But when I went to pick up Emerald, I realized I’d made a fatal error at not going back and dealing with her after I’d walked out. Emerald was nowhere in sight. I called her name and quickly did a tour of her villa, but it was empty. I found her maid sitting in the kitchen making freshly squeezed orange juice and drilled her for Emerald’s where-abouts. She shrugged and said Emerald had gone to work.

I called the production office in a panic and they said that they had no idea where Emerald was. The smug PA reminded me that keeping track of Emerald was supposed to be my job. I called her cell phone, but it rang once before my call was unceremoniously dumped to voice mail. Then I

tried Tensin, her driver, but it went straight to voice mail as well. I left a panicked message with him begging him to call me the second he got the message. I said a quick prayer hoping that all those early-morning cap-puccinos I’d charged to room service for him would have bought me a lit-tle loyalty. Perhaps it was karma as I was doing a similar thing to Luke, but I was getting the distinct feeling that I was being ignored. I called the production office again and asked them to send a driver as soon as possible and anxiously went to wait in the lobby for the car.

Thankfully on my way to the set, Tensin called in. He whispered into the phone that Emerald had insisted he leave without me and then wouldn’t let him take my calls. The situation was worse than expected, but at least she hadn’t gone AWOL and was on set, on time, and in one piece. Anxiety started to build in my gut in preparation for the inevitable drama. I knew I had to just take hat in hand and apologize for my outburst, but I had a sneaking suspicion that Emerald wasn’t going to make it easy.

When I got to the location, Emerald was already on set. She apparently had wanted to get there early to rehearse the escape from the bamboo prison cell scene, though she hadn’t bothered to mention that to me the day before. I called down on my walkie-talkie and asked the assistant director to put me on with Emerald. The AD went silent for approximately one second, then, sounding rather embarrassed, said that Emerald was too busy to talk to me. With urging from someone in the background, the AD proceeded to say that I wasn’t needed on set today and should just go wait at the hotel and answer Emerald’s fan mail until she got back. Great. The only day I actually wanted to hang out to flirt with Chris, I was being dismissed like some third-rate lackey. I walked over to one of the drivers and asked if someone could give me a lift back to the Amanpuri. Maybe it was better I didn’t see Chris un-til I was a little more certain about what I was doing with Luke. I didn’t want him to think I was a tease. I really appreciated his honesty and laid-back approach to being shunned last night. While I waited for a driver to show up, I walked over to the caterers and ordered the Thai version of an Egg McMuffin. It was such a pleasure to be able to abandon the sprouts and eat real food again. One of the key comforts of be-ing on location was that the food was really good. The caterers were

exceptional and cooked a variety of meals ranging from Pad Thai to fish and chips right there on set. And being the assistant of the star meant you could beg and plead to satisfy any bizarre food craving you might be having and they’d usually cook it up right then and there for you. But the egg McMuffin was standard and I’d just managed to take an enormously greedy bite into the soft runny yolk, which was now dribbling down my chin, when Chris walked up. He gave me an enormous smile and once again I felt all anxiety and stress drain from my body. How did he manage to do that? He was like Valium but in human form.