Chapter 37
Thirty-Seven
Victor
The next few weeks alternate between crazy-busy and hurry-up-and-wait. My client is about to film an action movie and while she’s generally very fit, we’ve planned an aggressive training schedule to get her ready to do a lot of her own stunts.
And look amazing in the skintight costume they’ve designed for her, naturally.
Stella Zedman has been a client for years and we’ve gotten to know each other pretty well. She’s very down-to-earth, especially for a celebrity, and she takes no bullshit, from directors, costars, the press.
No one.
Which makes it damned hard to hide my current distraction from her.
“Okay, what the hell’s going on?” she asks, after I’ve lost count of the number of reps she’s done for the second time.
“Nothing,” I insist. She gives me the look that makes every assistant she’s ever had quake. It doesn’t work on me.
Okay, maybe it works on me a little.
“Guy trouble,” I confess. She’s a lesbian, so I’m hoping this will telegraph that she doesn’t really want to know the details.
“Guy trouble?” She finishes her last set of bench presses and sits up. I toss a towel to her and she wipes the sweat from her face. “What sort of guy trouble?”
“There’s a guy and we can’t be together for various reasons and…it’s troubling, I guess. That’s all.”
“Why can’t you be together?” She moves to the weight rack and I load the plates onto the ends of the bar resting in its rack. She steps into the rack and positions the bar on her shoulders, then grasps the bar, lifts it off the rack, and starts her first set of squats.
“He lives in New York, for one thing.”
“So? You live half the year there, too. You’re going back next week.”
“We have sort of a complicated history.”
“How so?”
“Jesus, woman, if you can interrogate me while lifting, then maybe I should put more weight on.”
“I’m not…” she huffs and pushes up to a standing position, “interrogating you.” She does five more squats, which I make sure to count out loud, so she knows I really am paying attention.
When she steps back and racks the bar for a brief rest in between sets, she wipes her face again, and says, “I care about you, you ass, and you’re clearly miserable, so out with it. It’ll make you feel better.”
“Will it?” It’s not like she can do anything to fix it.
She steps back into position for her second set of squats. “My grandmother used to say ‘trouble shared is trouble halved.’” Stella’s grandmother was Hollywood royalty in the fifties and known for bon mots like this.
What the hell. It’s not like I have anyone else to talk about this with.
“I’m in love with my dead best friend’s widower.
He’s my daughter’s stepfather, we had a fling during her wedding, but we’ve led completely separate lives ever since his wife died, and I don’t see anything about that changing. ”
Succinct and delivered in a matter-of-fact way that doesn’t reveal how much the whole situation has been tearing me up inside.
I don’t mention the one-night stand on the night of Leah’s funeral.
Even saying this much out loud makes it real in a way it wasn't before.
All those years of half-hoping, of convincing myself that someday…
“Why not?”
“Well, for one thing, he’s bi, but there’s no way he can publicly be in relationship with a man.”
And that’s the crux of it. There is no someday with Jason. There's just what we’ve had, which isn’t enough, but that’s all there can be.
Stella pauses at the bottom of a squat. Which is when I remember that she’s not exactly out, either. Everyone who really knows her knows that she’s a lesbian, which means that her directors know, most of her costars know, her hairstylist, makeup artist, and personal assistants know.
Plus me, obviously. But the press doesn’t know and neither do most of the studio executives on the movies she’s worked on.
Most of Hollywood thinks the woman she’s been with for decades is her chief personal assistant and few people know they married secretly a few years ago. A wedding I officiated, as it happens.
“Sorry,” I say awkwardly.
“What are you apologizing for?” She finishes her squats and racks the weighted bar.
“I didn’t mean to…I mean, I’m not…” I trail off just as awkwardly. See, this is why I shouldn’t have even started talking about Jason.
“Judging me—or your boyfriend—for staying in the closet?”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” I say.
“Because he won’t come out?”
“No,” I protest. “He has good reasons for not coming out. Just like you do. I don’t hold it against him.”
Just because I came out in college—and it was hard enough for me to throw over my own early Catholic education—doesn’t mean that Jason has to. Ever.
“You just don’t want to be in a relationship that you have to hide.” Her tone is matter-of-fact. “I get that.”
I sigh. “I…yeah, I don’t.”
Except that's not quite true, is it? I'd take a hidden relationship over no relationship at all. I'd take whatever Jason was willing to give me. The problem isn't just that I don't want to hide, even though I really don’t. It's also that Jason hasn't offered me anything to hide.
She tosses me a smile after she wipes her face. “I really do get that.” She grabs her water bottles and takes a long swig. “If this film does well, I’ll probably finally stop keeping Wendy a secret.”
I stare at her. “Really?”
She takes another drink, then nods as she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. “I’m not planning a big announcement or anything. But I should be able to write my own ticket after this film and Wendy has been patient long enough.”
She sits on a weight bench and leans forward, her elbows on her knees, the water bottle dangling from her hands between them.
“It’s a weird thing to contemplate, you know.
Having to explain yourself to a world that’s as likely to smile on you as shun you, except you’ve no way of knowing which it’s going to be until you do it.
I’m already getting fewer great roles just because I’m over forty. ”
She’s pushing fifty, actually, but that’s another secret very few people know.
She sighs. “But I think I don’t give as much of a shit as I used to. If the studios already think that I’m a washed-up hag, they might as well know that I’m a dyke as well.”
“They don’t think that,” I tell her. “They wouldn’t have picked you to play this role if they did.”
She casts me a sideways look. “They fought casting me tooth and nail. It’s only because Julio insisted he wouldn’t do the movie at all if they didn’t let him hire me. And because he owns the rights to the project and can take it anywhere he wants.”
It’s a sprawling, epic, romantic, fantasy adventure based on an insanely popular book series and Stella is cast as one of the main characters, a warrior queen.
She describes it as “Game of Thrones meets Outlander without the rape or incest” and, while everyone laughs when she says that, she never does.
The director had snapped the rights up before the books became runaway bestsellers and when he started shopping the movie project around, there was a bidding war between three of the biggest studios.
And that was before he announced the big-name stars he wanted for the project.
“Anyway, all I’m saying is,” Stella continues. “Circumstances change. Maybe, under the right ones, your man will decide it’s safe to reveal himself.”
“He’s not my man, but maybe.” I shrug. I don’t need Jason to march at the head of the Pride parade.
I just don’t want to be the reason he gets fired from his job, or leaves the church he loves so much.
Even if I think his relationship with the Church is more like a neglectful, if not outright abusive, relationship.
But nothing’s going to change about me and Jason today. Probably never, if I’m honest.
I've told myself that before. After the funeral. After Jason completely ignored me at Kelsey's graduation. After every event over the years where he could have seen me watching him—wanting him—but he didn’t.
But this time it feels different. This time, I actually let myself believe it could be something, and now I have to unbelieve it.
“Let’s get back to work,” I tell Stella.