A Hollywood Affair
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Synopsis
Love and loyalties get tested in another gripping LA drama from Lucy Broadbent. Pearl Sash lives the dream. Adoring husband, perfect child, and a glamorous Hollywood Hills mansion. Shame how perfect gets boring, isn't it? Cue the re-entrance of Brett. Dangerous, sexy Brett who she married years ago, and who left her the second his own Hollywood star was rising. Now he's back, wanting to start over. No man ever made her feel so bad. No man ever made her feel so good! Will Pearl make the right decision to get her own Hollywood ending?
Release date: July 7, 2011
Publisher: Headline
Print pages: 352
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A Hollywood Affair
Lucy Broadbent
‘Uh-uh,’ he chides, shaking his head. ‘Honey, you’ve got to stay still.’
‘But you’ve piled up too many pillows,’ I plead. ‘My neck is hurting.’
He carefully removes a couple, changing the geometric angle of my upper body to something less likely to leave me with a permanent old-woman stoop. ‘How’s that?’
‘Well, I’ve been more comfortable in the dentist’s chair.’
Adam adjusts the pillows again, and ignores all further complaints. ‘Now, you’ve got to relax. You’ve got to think about s-s-s-sperm,’ he stutters, pulling the bedsheets and our giant red comforter around me. ‘Imagine them fighting their way up the pike. Imagine them punching through to the ovum. Punch. Kick. Punch—’
‘Is this what they call dirty sex?’ I interrupt.
‘Only if you’re doing it right,’ he quips, with a smirk that reminds me of times when sex had a little more frisson to it. ‘Now take a deep breath in …’ He sucks in his breath, filling out his mostly hairless chest and making a face like a puffer fish. ‘And out …’ He exhales theatrically. ‘You’ve got to relax into the vision. You’ve got to make it happen in your mind.’
I close my eyes, take a deep breath and focus my mind on sperm. If sex is such a natural phenomenon, how come there are so many manuals on how to do it? I wonder. But that is beside the point. Right now, I must focus on sperm. Sperm look like tadpoles. Tadpoles turn into frogs. Frogs can be found in pet shops. I remember a sign I saw in a pet shop that read: ‘All our pets are flushable.’ True story. A smile spreads, and I’m tempted to share it with Adam, but I know he won’t appreciate any tales of the U-bend just now. He is a man who takes on challenges with devotion and earnestness. And he views our current challenge – procreation – with all the seriousness of a banker reviewing debt.
He lingers by the bedside table, surveying the neatness of the bedcovers and considering what else he can do to help. If there was anything, Adam would do it. If waving pompoms and wearing a cheerleader skirt would help, he’d be in one. If standing on his head would help, he’d do it. Although he thinks I should be doing that. But I’ve told him I’m not going that far. You’ve got to draw the line somewhere.
‘Go, boys, go,’ he eventually calls, actually putting his head under the covers and addressing my belly button. ‘These are going to be the ones, honey. I just know they are,’ he says, re-emerging and mercifully now talking to my face. ‘I can feel it. There’s special magic gone into these ones …’ He smiles sweetly at me, and strokes my shoulder. ‘I think one of these is going to cut the mustard.’
For his sake, I hope one does too. A baby would make Adam feel so much more secure.
‘I’ll set the clock for twenty minutes,’ he says, and begins to fumble with the buttons on the alarm.
‘It’s okay. I can watch for twenty minutes,’ I say, waving him away.
‘The devil’s in the detail, Pearl.’
‘It’s okay. I won’t cheat.’
‘I’ll set the clock,’ he says firmly, and I let him, because when he’s in the bathroom I’ll turn it off anyway. Men just need to think they’re in control.
Aware that he hasn’t got any further excuses to hang around and stand guard, Adam takes his patrol to the full-length window and tugs the velvet curtains open to let the morning light spill into the bedroom. It’s only seven a.m., but already the sun is bright enough to make the palm trees shimmer as they catch the light outside our window. Still naked, Adam surveys the view of our garden and the Los Angeles skyline beyond. It would be hard for anyone to see in – our house sits on a hillside, overlooking a high bougainvillea hedge at the end of our lawn, several trees, and the city way, way below. We sometimes have coyotes and deer passing across our land, but never any neighbours. Still, it doesn’t seem right to stand at a window brazenly naked. My mother is Catholic, after all.
Eventually he disappears into the bathroom, leaving me to contemplate his swimmers, a small spider who is diligently weaving a cobweb overhead, and the reality of the day ahead, which is weighing me down like a pair of concrete boots.
I used to always be able to sleep no matter what lay ahead the next day, immune to nerves or the flotsam my brain would throw at me during the night. But these days I lie awake and worry, wrestling with fears and a frenzied state of exhaustion in the dark. With today pending in my mind’s in-tray, it was never going to be a good night. But my therapist tells me it’s best not to dwell. And I must think about sperm.
When did sex get to be so dull? I wonder. It was never that passionate in the first place with Adam. He’s not that sort. He’s kind and adoring, but not the sex-in-an-elevator type. Rather like Rachel in Friends, the most adventurous place we’ve ever had sex is the bottom of the bed. And when we first embarked on romance, he actually asked me how I liked my sex, rather like a waiter taking an order for steak. Rare, medium or well done. I half expected him to produce his notebook and take notes. Anything other than back to back, I told him. Maybe I should have been more specific.
Adam wanted to know because he felt it was important to get it right, which is cute in its own way. It shows a certain willingness. But taking orders for sex is a bit like shopping for clothes on the internet – it looks like just the perfect dress when you order it, but by the time it arrives you’ve already been to the party you had it in mind for, and now you fancy something different. Not to mention it’s never quite as good in reality as it is in the picture.
Adam is a man who likes to get everything right. When a purchase is to be made, consumer magazines are consulted, options are weighed, stores visited, and only when he’s convinced does he get out his credit card. Which would be all right if he was buying a car, but when it’s only a roll of toilet paper at the supermarket … I sometimes tease him about how much research and consideration must have gone into choosing me for a wife, but Adam says that some things you just know and no research is necessary. He knew from the minute we met.
The shower taps squeak as Adam turns them off. There’s a restful silence after the water stops, then the click of the shower door opening and the thunderous and conscientious rubbing of towel against flesh. Now will come the ten-minute shave, the patting of aftershave, two precise minutes of electric toothbrush buzzing and then the combing of gel through his thick, tufty hair. After three years of marriage, the routine is strangely comforting to me. Precision is what Adam likes best, and if he missed just one second off his teeth-cleaning regime, I’d feel unnerved.
‘I’m pitching a script today,’ he tells me as he re-emerges from the bathroom and begins a search through his closet for clothes. I run an eye over the body I’ve come to be so familiar with. He is not a tall man, nor a big build, but he’s fit. Three mornings of power yoga a week have produced the long, curved lines of muscle definition in his arms and torso. His hair is slicked back with gel, making it darker than its normal mousy brown. And his hazel eyes are yet to be shrouded by the armour of his dark-rimmed glasses, which transform him from the safe, loving person who shares the bed with me into the scriptwriter who battles with the politics of film-making every day. He’s not a handsome man in a traditional sense, but beauty comes from within, and Adam is kind. It’s one of the reasons I love him.
‘It’s g-g-g-going to be a b-b-big meeting,’ he continues, picking out a pair of Gucci pants. Adam sometimes has a stutter. He’s battled to overcome it all his life, and it usually only shows when he’s nervous.
‘Well, I’m sure you’ll do well,’ I say soothingly.
A loud thump from Thackeray’s bedroom disturbs us. It’s Thackeray’s feet hitting the ground as he gets out of bed. He pad-pad-pads across the hardwood floor to my side and sleepily climbs into the bed. My gorgeous five year old. His toes are icy cold – one of the hazards of always kicking the bedclothes off – and I wrap him in my highly prized 1,500-thread-count Bloomingdale sheets, with his little head nestling in the crook of my arm. During the day he barely stops – a human dynamo who has no time for cuddles – but in the morning and at bedtime, there’s a brief chance to breathe in his smell, feel the softness of his warm cheek and smother him in abundant maternal love.
‘Is it a school day today?’ he asks, sitting up beside me and breaking into a smile that could only have come from his father’s DNA – engaging, captivating, bewitching, the kind that I know will get him whatever he wants in life. Sometimes Thackeray looks so much like his father, it’s almost as if I didn’t have a hand in his birth at all. The dark eyes that can tell me his mood without him even needing to speak, the mop of auburn hair that he hates me cutting, the long limbs that I know are going to make him tall. God, he’s beautiful.
‘Yup, sure is.’
‘When’s it gonna be Saturday?’ he whines.
‘Today it’s Wednesday, then comes Thursday, then it’s Friday. Then it’s Saturday.’
‘But that’s so long.’ He pouts, and then notices my strange position. ‘Mommy, why are you lying like that?’ he asks.
‘I’m practising being a human bridge for your train set,’ I tell him.
‘Cool,’ he announces, as if it’s perfectly natural and logical that I would want to practise such a thing.
Adam plants a kiss on Thackeray’s forehead. ‘Morning, buddy,’ he says. ‘Sleep well?’
It takes a special man to take on another man’s child and raise him as his own. It’s another of the reasons why I love Adam. Thackeray needed a father and Adam stepped up, consulting child behavioural books and Best Toy magazine as he went. And somehow that makes it even more heartbreaking that we haven’t been able to conceive a child together ourselves. I want to give Adam that. He’s been so kind to us.
We started trying for a baby not long after we got married. It was Adam’s idea. ‘It’s the right thing to do,’ he told me, and I knew it probably was. At first it didn’t seem to matter that no baby ever came, but the more you’re deprived of something, the more you want it, and now trying is part of the narrative of our life together. Every month we go through the motions of making love, but when sex is for its real biological purpose, it’s about as romantic as an accountant’s spreadsheet.
Sometimes I even secretly prefer the monthly visits to the doctor’s medical office, where Adam disappears into a cubicle to magically produce his finest into a Petri dish. Then an hour later, after his sperm are spun through a special scientific kind of washing machine that is meant to make the little darlings more potent, rather than just plain dizzy, they are squirted inside me with the scientific equivalent of a turkey baster. It’s clinical, soulless, but at least it gives me an opportunity to say to the doctor, ‘How was it for you?’
I’m too young to be infertile, according to the doctors. I’m only twenty-five, after all. They think our problem lies in the mobility of Adam’s sperm and the concentration of his semen, which means (and yes, we actually paid money for this advice), the more frequently we have sex, the better our chances. Also the use of this special sperm washing machine will help.
It’s all just a question of timing – precise timing, a language that Adam speaks, metered out usually by the Cartier Ballon Bleu on his wrist, which took no fewer than ten shopping trips and three months’ internet research to purchase. It can take approximately twenty minutes for a sperm to make it to a woman’s uterus, where we hope an egg lies in wait, which is why Adam likes me to lie like this for twenty precise minutes after sex, pelvis raised to help them on their way. I’ve no idea if it helps, but I get a nice lie-in, which is fine on the weekend, but today is a work day, and not just any work day. It’s a day I’ve been mentally playing out in my head for more than four years now. Today is a day that has my heart pounding like bad seventies disco music.
So after Adam has taken Thackeray downstairs for waffles and cereal, I sneak out of bed. What’s a few minutes between sperm, after all? I scurry quietly to the bathroom, avoiding the squeaky floorboard in the middle of the bedroom, and then to my closet. What to wear? A killer suit, for sure. But the Donna Karan with the above-the-knee skirt or the Armani with pants? Or what about the Missoni double-breasted? Or the Alexander McQueen jumpsuit? I falter briefly. Sexy or bank worker? Defiant red or blend-into-the-scenery black? The look I am after is Carrie Bradshaw Kicks Ass. I choose the red Donna Karan with the above-the-knee skirt.
Now the shoes. I pick out a pair of Stuart Weitzman stilettos – spiky, mean, and high enough to change my view. The stiletto was named after the Italian knife favoured by assassins. How apt for a day like today. As a short person, I have always gone for heels. They change everything – they give height, authority, and a certain steeliness. They elevate the butt, sculpt the calves, elongate the thighs. It’s just such a shame that they hurt your feet so much.
I dress quickly and survey the completed look. Today I am confident, strong, resilient. I am a desirable woman. I’ve got five thousand dollars’ worth of therapy behind me. I can do this. But what’s with the dark circles under my eyes? I lean in closer to the mirror. How did they get there? I pull the skin taut and experiment with a few facial expressions to banish the shadows. They don’t seem to show if I scrunch up my nose, but this is not an ideal look for a day in the office. I pull out my make-up and work quickly. Concealer, foundation, fawn eyeshadow, more foundation, a little blush, mascara, eyeliner, more mascara, a bit more foundation, and some bright red lipstick to match the suit. Too much? Nah. Not for today.
‘You look nice,’ Adam proclaims as I teeter into the kitchen. Snowy, our white cockatiel, whistles at me from her cage by the window and Thackeray asks me why I’ve got red lips.
‘It’s only lipstick,’ I tell him. ‘You’ve seen me wear it before.’
‘But they’re so red,’ he marvels. ‘Like blood. Is lipstick made from blood?’
Thackeray is developing a frightening interest in all things biological. I caught him trying to dissect the neighbour’s cat in the garden last week with a kitchen knife. Poor Pickles didn’t even have the dignity of anaesthetic.
‘No, it’s just make-up. No blood,’ I reassure. Thackeray looks disappointed.
‘Not secretly running for office?’ says Adam, who has returned to his task of stacking plates in the dishwasher. We have a maid who will do this, but Adam is an obsessive tidier.
‘Just thought I’d dress up a bit today, that’s all,’ I say, doing my best to sound casual. ‘There’s a meeting on.’
I feel a stab of conscience. I don’t like telling lies. And it’s not that I have. I’m just wearing a suit to work. People do it all the time. It’s just a suit, for goodness’ sake.
‘Well, you look great.’
‘It’s just a suit.’
I catch sight of the clock, which is seconds off 7.45 a.m. ‘Got to go, I’m going to be late.’ I grab a banana from the fruit bowl, and reach across the table to kiss Thackeray goodbye.
‘Mummy, are you picking me up from school today?’ he asks, always a master at keeping me glued to him.
‘Sure am, sugar. Daddy’s taking you, and I’m bringing you home. Is that OK?’
He nods. I kiss him again, then wipe the lipstick mark off his cheek, and blow one to Adam.
‘Love you,’ he calls after me.
Luckily, it usually only takes me fifteen minutes to get to work – as long as it’s not a Thursday, when the traffic gods send us the garbage truck to test karmic patience and block our road. Our house is in Bel Air – not far from a house that Elizabeth Taylor once owned, and another that Ronald Reagan died in. To call it an expensive neighbourhood would be like describing LA as simply big. And you know, of course, that LA is super, mega, double-whammy, triple-XL, blow-your-mind enormous. It can take you three days just to get across it – and that’s without traffic. When people buy houses in Bel Air, they’re not worrying if they can afford the cleaner’s hours to get round all of the bedrooms. That is, if they can even remember how many bedrooms they have.
We’ve always been able to remember how many bedrooms we’ve got, since there are only four. And we haven’t a pool, but we do have a double garage, hot tub and, most importantly, the 90077 zip code, which matters a great deal. Call me a snob, I don’t mind. LA wasn’t built without snobs, just as Rome wasn’t built in a day.
My boss’s mansion has got the 90210 zip code, which some people think is better, but I say what’s the difference? It’s either grand cru or vintage champagne. Both are good. He’s also got ten bedrooms, or is it twelve? I’ve forgotten. That’s as well as the home cinema, basement massage parlour, spa, arcade games room, basketball court, tennis court, swimming pools, and grounds that are big enough to show up on maps. Those are big differences. Taking care of them all is part of my job. I’m his PA. And my office is just off the vast hallway.
Having made it to work on time, this is where I now cower. Despite all the affirmations of confidence and strength inside my head, the message that I’m a beautiful, desirable, intelligent woman doesn’t appear to be reaching my hands, which are shaking like mini-earthquakes. Come on, you can do this, I tell myself. I try to make the coffee (decaffeinated, naturally), but am forced to abandon the mission when the waves inside the coffee pot reach tsunami proportions. I am feeling the way I used to as a little girl in the doctor’s waiting room, terrified in the knowledge that the pain and lingering hurt of an injection is a certainty in my future.
I try reading today’s Variety magazine, which is sitting on my desk – Julia Roberts has turned down millions to do a new movie because she wants to be a stay-at-home mom – but all I can think of is the buzzer from the front gates, and Brett Ellis’s Ferrari pulling up at the front of the house. I practise being cool inside my head. I can do cool. I’m good at that. I’ll be so frosty, the windows will ice up. I’ll be Medusa and turn Brett Ellis to stone. I’ll be Poison Ivy and turn him into a tree. I’ll be Roxie Hart and murder him at an unsuspecting hour.
The buzzer goes. ‘Hello. Can I help you?’ I say politely.
The familiarity of the voice over the intercom shocks me. It’s the same as it always was – warm, velvety, soft. Somehow, after all this time, I expected it to be different. Meaner, perhaps, harsher. It’s easy to create demons, I realise, with the distance of time.
‘It’s Brett Ellis,’ says my ex-husband. I press the button to let him drive his car up to the house.
I realised for the first time that my parents weren’t the same as other kids’ when I was four years old. We were at Mortons in Beverly Hills. The five of us were together, which in itself was noteworthy. We were rarely together as a family – not even at Christmas or Thanksgiving. Mum was wearing a big hat – a wide-brimmed straw creation that must have been fashionable at the time. Also sunglasses, big, black and shiny, that would slide down her nose. And bright pink lips that matched her nails. She smelled strongly of perfume and cigarette smoke. I remember also a yellow flowery sun-dress that showed off her shoulders and a bony collarbone. As always, she was groomed to perfection. My childhood is metered in outfits I can remember her wearing – Chanel, Givenchy, Lacroix, Fendi. There wasn’t a designer name missing from the party that went on behind the closed doors of her closet every day. Dad would have been in his usual jeans, T-shirt, leather jacket maybe. Nothing noteworthy. But that was not his role. He was always low-key, hand in hand with a spectacular bird of paradise. He liked it that way.
That day, Lydia, my older half-sister by eight years, had pulled rank and insisted on sitting next to Dad. Ashley, who was five, wanted to sit on the other side of him. There was almost a scene. But I’d been placated with the promise of ice cream if I didn’t cause a fuss.
It was then, with a basket of bread rolls obscuring my sightline of anything on the table because the chair was low and they didn’t have a booster seat for me to sit on, that I became aware that people were looking over at us. The other diners would pretend that they weren’t, but I could see them surreptitiously glancing over menus and whispering. Or they’d pretend they were just looking casually around the room, yet their gazes, all too obviously, kept returning to us.
Then I heard a woman at the next table saying, ‘Isn’t that Gavin Sash over there?’ She was asking the waiter! Why would the waiter know who my dad was? And how did she know his name? Did she know my name?
‘How come that lady knows you, Daddy?’ I asked him.
‘I don’t know, sweetheart,’ he said lamely.
‘Because your daddy is famous,’ Mum interjected from behind her dark glasses.
Even as a four year old, with scant understanding of emotion, I could see the pride with which she said it. ‘Everyone knows your daddy,’ she added.
‘What, everyone in this restaurant?’
‘Probably.’ She nodded with a satisfied smile. ‘Probably in all of America.’
‘Probably all the world,’ Lydia chimed in like a smartass, relishing the opportunity of showing off her twelve-year-old knowledge.
‘But I don’t want everyone to know him,’ I stammered. The news upset me. I felt the wound of jealousy. It was bad enough having to share Daddy with Lydia and Ashley, let alone everyone else in the restaurant, let alone everyone else in the world. Who were all these people that had a claim on him? ‘He’s MY daddy,’ I shouted. ‘They can’t know him. I won’t let them.’
I caused quite a disturbance in the restaurant – the sight of Gavin Sash placating a tantruming child was enough to lift the veil off all pretence at politeness, and now people stared at us quite openly. In the end, I got to sit on Dad’s knee – a supreme victory over Lydia and Ashley – but the jealousy was a long way off subsiding.
Strangely, I didn’t feel the same stab of resentment when Lydia chose this moment to break it to me that Mum was famous too. ‘Your mummy’s a model. That means people photograph her because she’s so beautiful,’ she explained patiently, slyly, cat-like, making quite sure I’d understood. Tantrums from me always made Lydia look good. ‘That means everyone knows who she is too.’
My placatory ice-cream sundae was too delicious to spoil with more tears, but somehow I’d always known Mum wasn’t mine anyway. She was always too far out of reach. It wasn’t Mum who woke us up in the mornings, it was Betty, our nanny. It wasn’t Mum who took me to the park, it was Betty. It wasn’t Mum who cuddled me when I fell and hurt my knee. Betty, I knew, was mine.
But even though Dad wasn’t around much, he was still mine too. And I was his. He had told me as much. There was something between us that was always special. ‘Who’s Daddy’s Pearl?’ he’d ask.
‘I am,’ I’d say. ‘And who’s Pearl’s big daddy?’
‘I am, silly!’ he’d laugh.
No need to say it. I know I am a chicken. Hiding inside my office, with Brett out there in the hall, practically on the other side of the door, wasn’t quite what I had in mind this morning when I got dressed. I’m ashamed of myself. But I can’t go out there. I can’t.
‘How ya doin’, Maria?’ I hear Brett say chirpily.
‘Same shit. Different day,’ she replies.
In a moment of impressive cowardice, I asked Maria, the housekeeper, to let Brett in. Showing clients into Stephen’s office is my job. But I just couldn’t do it.
‘You’re looking younger than ever,’ I hear him tell her. He always could lay on the charm if he wanted to. ‘Where’s the big boss?’
‘In his office,’ says Maria. ‘Step this way?’
I hear his footsteps stop by a David Hockney that’s hung on the west wall. That means he is only a few metres from me now. If I put my nose to the crack in the door, I bet I could even smell him. Wonder if he still wears L’Homme aftershave. He’ll be squinting at the picture now, creasing up his eyes with the air of an art dealer. He always liked to think he knew about art. Eventually I hear his footsteps on the stone floor disappear into Stephen’s office, and then the false bonhomie and back-slapping as the two men greet.
‘Can you get us some coffee?’ I hear Stephen ask Maria. Then the door closes and the voices become a low burble.
I let out a sigh. Pathetic. That’s what I am. Pathetic.
I never thought I’d go back to work after Thackeray was born. But when he started school last year, I needed something to fill the hours. ‘You must always have an upcoming album,’ Dad used to say, speaking figuratively for a personal project. He always insisted we had to make our own way, just as he had. Adam was encouraging too about going back to work. He knew that too many hours on my own risked a bill from Fred Segal, my favourite place to shop. Working for Stephen is not the most ambitious of jobs. It’s mundane largely, but I enjoy reading the movie scripts. There are a lot that pass over my desk.
I was Stephen’s PA for two years before I got pregnant with Thackeray. In Stephen Shawe’s world that was a record – most of his PAs quit after a month because being bad-tempered comes as naturally to him as it does to camels. He owns the biggest talent agency in LA, and likes to think that that puts him up there with Oprah Winfrey and the President in terms of power. But difficult people are my speciality – I’ve lived with enough of them – and when I heard Stephen was hiring, I called him up, laying out my terms for returning to my old job. Two mornings off a month for my charity lunches, and I had to be out of there before three p.m. to pick up Thackeray from school. No exceptions. Not that Stephen ever remembers.
What I hadn’t thought through properly when I took on the job again was that Brett Ellis is one of Stephen’s biggest clients. In the back of my mind I knew, of course. It was me who introduced the two of them in the first place. But Stephen’s clients rarel. . .
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