Susan Phillips - Glitter Baby

She’d been reading Jake’s plays as well as a few scholarly articles about his work. She’d also done some research on his social life, which wasn’t as easy because of his obsession with privacy. Still, she’d discovered he seldom dated the same woman more than a few times.

She met him at the end of the driveway where he was stretching his hamstrings. “Think you can keep up, Flower, or should I get a stroller for you?”

“That’s so weird. I was getting ready to bring out a wheelchair.”

“Ouch.”

She grinned, and they took off at an easy trot. Since it was Sunday, the army of gardeners who kept the unused front lawns of Beverly Hills immaculate was absent, and the street looked even more deserted than usual. She tried to think of something interesting to say. “I’ve seen you shooting baskets by the parking lot. Lynn told me you played in college.”

“I play a couple of times a week now. It helps clear my head to write.”

“Aren’t playwrights supposed to be intellectuals instead of jocks?”

“Playwrights are poets, Flower, and that’s what basketball is. Poetry.”

And that’s what you are, she thought. A dark and complicated piece of erotic poetry. She had to be careful not to trip over her feet. “I like basketball, but it doesn’t exactly fit my idea of poetry.”

“You ever hear of a guy named Julius Erving?”

She shook her head and picked up the pace so he couldn’t accuse her of holding him back.

He altered his rhythm. “They call Erving ‘The Doctor.’ He’s a young player with the New York Nets, and he’s going to be one of the best. Not just good, you understand-but one of the best basketball players who ever lived.”

Fleur mentally added Julius Erving to her reading list.

“Everything the Doc does on the court is poetry. Laws of gravity disappear when he moves. He flies, Flower. Men aren’t supposed to fly, but Julius Erving does. That’s poetry, kiddo, and that’s what makes me write.”

He suddenly looked uncomfortable, as if he’d revealed too much about himself. Out of the corners of her eyes, she saw the shutters slam over his face. “Let’s pick up the pace,” he said with a growl. “We might as well be walking.”

Not because of her. She shot ahead of him and cut over to a paved bike path, stretching her legs and pushing herself. He caught up with her, and before long, patches of sweat had broken out on both their T-shirts. “Tell me about your problem with the scene tomorrow,” he finally said.

“It’s kind of…hard to explain.” She was out of breath, and she sucked in more air. “Lizzie…seems so calculating.”

He slowed the pace for her. “She is. A calculating bitch.”

“But even though she resents DeeDee, she loves her…and she knows how DeeDee feels about Matt.” She filled her lungs. “I can understand why she’s attracted to him-why she wants to…go to bed with him-but I don’t understand her being so calculating about it.”

“It’s the history of womankind. Nothing like a man to break up the friendship of two women.”

“That’s crap.” She thought of her earlier stab of jealousy toward Belinda and didn’t like herself for it. “Women have better things to do than fight over some guy who probably isn’t worth anything in the first place.”

“Hey, I’m the one who’s defining reality around here. You’re only the mouthpiece.”

“Writers.”

He smiled, and she fortified herself with more air. “DeeDee seems more…complete than Lizzie. She has strengths and weaknesses. You want to comfort her and shake her at the same time.” She stopped just short of saying that DeeDee was better written, even though it was true.

“Very good. You read the script.”

“Don’t patronize me. I have to play the part, and I don’t understand her. She bothers me.”

Jake picked up the pace again. “She’s supposed to bother you. Look, Flower, from what I understand you led a pretty sheltered life until a couple of years ago. Maybe you’ve never experienced anyone like Lizzie, but a woman like that leaves tooth marks in a man.”

“Why?”

“Who cares? It’s the end effect that matters.”

Her lust-crush didn’t keep her from getting angry with him. “You don’t say ‘who cares’ about your other characters. Why do you say it about Lizzie?”

“I guess you’ll have to trust me.” He pulled ahead of her.

“Why should I trust you?” she called out after him. “Because you’ve got a big Pulitzer, and all I have are Cosmo covers!”

He slowed his stride. “I didn’t say that.” They’d reached a small park as empty as the rest of the neighborhood. “Let’s walk for a while.”

“You don’t have to babysit me.” She hated the sulky note in her voice.

“Let’s have it out,” he said, as he slowed. “Are you pissed about Lizzie or about the fact that you know I didn’t want to cast you?”

“You’re the one defining reality. Take your pick.”

“Let’s talk about casting, then.” He picked up the tail of his T-shirt and wiped his face. “You’re beautiful on screen, Flower. Your face is magic, and you’ve got knockout legs. Johnny Guy’s been adjusting the shooting script every night to add more close-ups. The man gets tears in his eyes watching you in the rushes.” He smiled at her, and she could feel some of her anger dissolving. “You’re also a great kid.”

A kid. That hurt.

“You listen to other people’s opinions, you work hard, and I’ll bet you don’t have a malicious bone in your body.”

She thought about Michel and knew that wasn’t true.

“That’s why I had misgivings about you playing Lizzie. She’s a carnivore. The whole concept is foreign to your nature.”

“I’m an actress, Jake. Part of acting is playing a role different from yoursef.” She felt like a hypocrite. She wasn’t an actress. She was a fake, a girl whose freak-show body was mysteriously transformed by the camera into something beautiful.

He ran his fingers through his hair, making it stand up in little spikes along one side. “Lizzie is a hard character for me to talk about. She’s based on a girl I used to know. We were married a long time ago.”

Was Jake, the Greta Garbo of male actors, going to confide in her? Not willingly. He looked angry at having revealed even that small amount of personal history. “What was she like?” she asked.

A muscle in his jaw ticked. “It’s not important.”

“I want to know.”

He took a few steps, then stopped. “She was a man-eater. Ground me up between her pretty little teeth and spit me out.”

The stubbornness that had caused her so much trouble in the past took over. “But there had to have been something that made you fall in love with her.”

He started walking again. “Lay off.”

“I need to know.”

“I said lay off. She was a great fuck, okay?”

“Is that all?”

He stopped and spun on her. “That’s all. Thousands of satisfied customers found happiness between her legs, but the Slovak kid from Cleveland was too ignorant to figure that out, and he lapped her up like a puppy dog!”

His pain hit her like a slap. She touched his arm. “I’m sorry. Really.” He pulled his arm away, and as they ran back to the house in silence, Fleur wondered what kind of person his former wife had been.

Jake’s thoughts were following a similar path. He’d met Liz at the beginning of his freshman year in college. He’d been on the way home from basketball practice when he’d wandered into a rehearsal at the university theater building. She was onstage, the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen, a tiny, dark-haired kitten. He asked her out that same night, but she told him she didn’t date jocks. Her resistance made her even more appealing, and he began hanging out at the theater building between practices. She continued to ignore him. He discovered she was taking a playwriting class the next semester, and he fast-talked his way past the prerequisites into the same class. It changed his life.

He wrote about the men he’d met when he was doing odd jobs in Cleveland’s blue-collar bars. The Petes and Vinnies who’d gradually taken the place of the father he didn’t have, the men who asked him about his schoolwork, and laid into him for cutting class, and one night, when they found out he’d been picked up by the police for trying to steal a car, took him into the alley behind the bar and taught him the meaning of tough love.

The words poured out of him, and the professor was impressed. Even more important, he’d finally drawn Liz’s attention. Because her family was wealthy, his poverty fascinated her. They read Gibran together and made love. He began letting down the walls he’d built around himself. Before he knew it, they’d decided to get married, even though he was only nineteen, and she was twenty. Her father threatened to cut off her allowance, so she told him she was pregnant. Daddy whisked them to Youngstown for a fast ceremony, but when he found out the pregnancy was a sham, he stopped the checks. Jake lengthened his hours working at the town diner when he wasn’t in class or at basketball practice.

A new graduate student enrolled in the theater department, and when Jake came home, he found him sitting with Liz at the gray Formica kitchen table talking about the meaning of life. One night he walked in on them in bed. Liz cried and begged Jake to forgive her. She’d said she was lonely and not used to being poor. Jake forgave her.

Two weeks later he found her down on her knees working over one of his teammates. Her innocence, he discovered, had been shared with legions. He took the keys to her Mustang, headed for Columbus, and enlisted. The divorce papers reached him near Da Nang. Vietnam, coming so soon after Liz’s betrayal, had changed him forever.

When he’d written Sunday Morning Eclipse, Liz’s ghost had come back to haunt him. She’d sat on his shoulder whispering words of innocence and corruption. She’d become Lizzie. Lizzie with her open, innocent face and the heart of a harlot. Lizzie, who bore no resemblance to the beautiful giant of a kid running beside him.

“I was wrong about you. You’re going to be a great Lizzie,” he said, not meaning it. “All you need is a little faith in yourself.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Absolutely.” He reached out and gave her hair a quick tug. “You’re a good kid, Flower Power. If I had a sister, I’d want her to be just like you. Except not such a smart-ass.”

Jake watched as Belinda gradually won over every male on the set, from the lowliest crew member to Dick Spano to Jake himself. She was always there if someone needed her. She ran lines with the actors, joked with the grips, and rubbed away Johnny Guy’s stiff neck. She brought them all coffee, teased them about their wives and girlfriends, and pumped up their egos.

“The changes you made in DeeDee’s monologue were pure genius,” she told Jake in June, during the second month of shooting. “You dug deep.”

“Shucks, ma’am, it weren’t nothing.”

She regarded him earnestly. “I mean it, Jake. You nailed it. When she said, ‘I give up, Matt. I give up.’ I started to cry. You’re going to win an Oscar. I just know it.”

What touched him about Belinda’s enthusiasm was that she meant every overly effusive word. After a few moments with her, whatever bad mood he might have been carrying around vanished. She flirted shamelessly with him, soothed him, and made him laugh. Beneath the balm of her hyacinth-eyed adoration, he felt like a better actor, a better writer, and a less cynical man. She was fascinating, a worldly sophisticate with a child’s eager passion for everything bright and shiny. She helped make Eclipse one of the best sets he’d ever worked on.

“Years from now,” she proclaimed, “everyone here will be proud to tell the world they worked on Eclipse.”

No one disagreed.

Fleur dreaded going to work more each day. She hated hearing Jake and Belinda laugh. Why couldn’t she entertain him like her mother did? Being on the set was torture, and not just because of Jake. She hated acting even more than modeling. Maybe if she were better in her part, she wouldn’t feel so dispirited. Not that she was awful or anything, but she was the weak link in a great cast, and she’d never been satisfied with being anything but the bravest, the fastest, and the strongest.

Belinda predictably pushed aside her concerns. “You’re being way too hard on yourself, baby. It’s those awful nuns. They gave you overachiever’s syndrome.”

Fleur gazed across the set at Jake. He mussed her hair, dragged her out to shoot baskets with him, yelled at her if she argued with him, and treated her exactly like a kid sister. She wished she could talk to Belinda about her feelings for him, but her mother was the last person she could ever confide in about this.