Chapter 16
Michael
I slept on the couch when I slept at all. Most nights though, I didn’t sleep well, and I could be found in the big empty room in my guest house, watching movies.
“Watching” might not be the exact right word. I analyzed them. Primarily, I analyzed the acting, the way the story was revealed in postures, glances, and small movements. I could watch a great movie a hundred times and every time peel off layers of the actors’ preparation.
If I’d told Laine what I did when I got home from kissing her, I’d be embarrassed. I captured the feeling in my heart and mind and ran home without thinking of much outside it, and I put on Casablanca.
There was a single kiss, told in flashback. Humphrey Bogart kisses Ingrid Bergman in Paris, and that powerful alpha male we met in the beginning of the movie, who was leathered with experience and fermented in whiskey, closes his eyes and surrenders completely. He seems to be in such rapture that he loses track of the kiss, and his mouth slides off Bergman’s for a second then returns.
I thought, as I kissed Laine, that that feeling was what Bogart was channeling when he shot the scene. Complete surrender to the moment, to another person, to a kiss.
When I got home, I didn’t go into the main house. I went right to the guest house. I didn’t even close the door or take off my jacket. I cued up the projector. Casablanca came on seconds later. I knew where that kiss was in the chapters, because I’d spent hours trying to peel it apart, wondering how I could catch that feeling and put it on the screen.
I didn’t sit on the leather couch but stood in front of the projected image, watching for that moment. That feeling I held… I let it go. I let myself feel that heat of excitement, that twitch of need. It was on the screen. Even with his eyes closed, Bogart had it. People lived and died for it. Gave up everything to feel it.
I plopped on the couch and let it run without sound, because the words were just distractions. I saw how his hand moved on her for the first time, and I understood the possessiveness in every twitch of his fingers. The love scenes in Bullets were coming after Britt’s break. I was going to nail them.
I sat on the couch, leaning back in the cushions, and let the movie run. The whole thing became clear to me. It wasn’t even acting. Bogart was living that character. I wished I could go back and reshoot every love scene I’d ever done. They’d been all affect and indicating. What a waste.
I fell asleep and woke when the couch cushions tilted and I went off balance. I opened my eyes, still foggy.
“If people only knew,” Ken said, “Michael Greydon doesn’t sleep on a feather bed with a leggy blonde but craps out in front of old movies in his dress pants. Are you still wearing your shoes? Jesus, kid.”
“How did you get in here?”
“You use my old cleaning lady, and I greased her wheels. Answer the door next time.” He slapped a manila envelope and a stack of pictures on my lap. “I’ve been up all night.”
I didn’t want to open the envelope, but I couldn’t avoid the pictures. She was stunning. That hair was going to make me crazy. I wanted to twist it into shapes all over her body.
“I assume that’s the last of her,” he said. “But it’s still got to be managed.”
“No.” I tossed the stack in Ken’s lap and got up to stretch my legs. These days off were going to kill me. I couldn’t make it a habit to sleep past seven. “That’s not the last of her unless she turns me down. Which she won’t.”
“How am I supposed to spin this?” Ken asked.
“It’s not my job to make your job easy.”
Casablanca had been on a loop, and Bogart was on my wall, saying something clever and manly at the bar. On his face, with the sound down, I could see every second of heartbreak.
“I don’t mind difficult,” Ken said. “I mind impossible.”
I scooped up the remote and shut off the player. “The public doesn’t care what she does for a living. They’ll think it’s cute.”
“The public? The public has to know who you are, or you don’t have a career. It’s the industry you have to worry about. Do not underestimate their influence.” He counted off his fingers. “The press, who hate paps even when they pay them. The agents, who have clients who can’t get work because of what these assholes get on camera. Publicists, yes, that’s me—”
“Whose job is to spin it. Spin it, Ken. Get off my back.”
“You don’t go to bed with paparazzi. That’s nuts. No one even talks about that. You don’t let the wolves into the hen house.”
“This is my personal life. You’re as bad as they are.”
I felt encased in clay, trapped by Ken’s intentions against my own. I walked out into the yard, squinting against the winter sun.
My house sat on a hill. The yard was small considering what I paid for the place, but the scope of the back view could wipe out a man’s personality for seconds at a time. That was why I’d bought it. It didn’t make me feel grandiose. It made me feel small and essential at the same time.
“This is not about where you’re putting your personal dick, Greydon,” Ken said from behind me. “This is about three generations of men in this business. It’s about the fact that you don’t know how to do anything else. You want to end up like Gareth? You want to spend ten years drinking because no one wants to hire a moody, temperamental ass who loses bond? And what could he do besides say tough guy lines? Nothing. He was trained to do nothing else. Like you. Outside the business, you have nothing. No skills. No assets. No training.”
“And my father managed to keep me in private school and a big house.”
“That’s how you judge his success? Let me ask you, how would you handle not working then leaning on your son to get a movie made so you can have your great comeback?”
I looked back at him. He had his hands in his pockets as if he was staying humble and non-confrontational.
“Lay off my father. You don’t know what you’re talking about.” I think I growled low, the words gurgling from my gut.
Ken put his hands up as if showing me he was unarmed. I knew better.
“You’re right. It’s not about your father. What does she mean to you? You’ve seen her twice since you were kids. What could she mean to you?”
“Not the point.”
“What is the point?” Ken could have gotten tight or irritated, but he didn’t. He was the picture of reason.
“I like her. That’s the point.”
“You can like a lot of girls.”
“I like her. Period. I don’t have to explain myself.”
He looked out over my view, squinting at the horizon. He put his sunglasses on. “You’re right.”
“I’m right?”
“You know what? This spins like a top.” He swept his hand over the landscape. “Michael Greydon. Hollywood’s new rule-breaker. Perfect. No one tells you what to do. You’ll date the foster kid with no family. The commoner. We don’t play her as the Hollywood underbelly. We play her as the sexy underdog. You’ll be America’s Boyfriend times a hundred.”
“I don’t think she’s open to being played.”
He flicked his wrist. “Irrelevant.”
“It’s totally relevant.”
“In a couple of weeks, you’re going back to shooting. Steven’s going to double down on the calendar, and you’re going to have zero access to anyone off set for a month.” He stepped down the flagstone path, and we walked to the front, where he’d parked his Mercedes. “You might want to check out that envelope I left on your couch.”
I put him in his car and watched him pull past my tarp-covered front hedges and out the gate.
I texted Laine.
—I still have your camera—