47. Bambi
Bambi
The story is everywhere—on all the news channels, the headlines pinging through on her phone and laptop.
The magazine stories coming through text messages from friends taking snapshots and sending them to her.
The world knows. LaMonte is filing sexual assault charges, and Jason’s contract is effectively canceled.
The studio is done with him, according to Agnes.
Footage of her and Jason at the hotel alone, standing in the lobby arm in arm, before it happened, gets leaked.
Suddenly, it seems so natural that he would be exposed.
Bambi switches off the TV. She can’t stand to see another headline about it.
She holds her stomach and sips the decaffeinated tea, her legs curled up in the oversized white chair in their living room. She pulls the throw blanket around her shoulders and shudders in the cold house.
This is good, she tells herself. She can leave now, no questions asked. She isn’t sure about the other part, but Martha told her it was necessary.
This time it had been Lauren LaMonte, but who had it been before?
In her mind, Bambi traces back over Jason’s series of co-stars.
Blondes, a brunette here and there, one redhead with short bangs whose name she confuses with another celebrity.
Bambi never kept track of them. Now she wishes she had.
One by one, their faces spring up in her mind’s eye.
So many kisses and after-parties. Small waists and high heels.
Bodies so fatless and perfect they scarcely looked real, and to her, that was saying something.
They were abnormally thin and small in real life.
Not at all the way they were on the screen.
Most celebrities are like this. Small, frail, and too real when you see them up close.
Like with Jason, the magic gets lost when they’re before you, shaking your hand or looking aloofly off to the side to wave to someone else more important than you.
A fake smile for you, but for Jason? They’d clutch his arm, entwine themselves around him in an antagonizing embrace that she could scarcely stand.
And then there were the interviews. The way they’d stand or sit next to one another in the press junkets.
The flirtatious eyes and pretend sister-brother comment she’d hear them throw around.
“So-and-so is like a sister to me,” was Jason’s favorite line.
Bambi cringes, thinking now of how she sat, watching him on stage presenting an award with one of them—a tall blonde with a round face, all legs and breasts—and the way he held her lightly by the waist as he said his line, “And the Oscar goes to …”
Not wanting to appear small-minded or as an outsider, Bambi played along.
The role of the good celebrity’s wife. Isn’t that what was done?
But lately, Bambi had been made to feel a fool.
A silly fool that all the world was laughing at behind the scenes.
And meanwhile, Jason betrayed her on set after set after set.
His people—ferocious and hungry for his fees—lapped up the scandals for him and stomached dirty abuses to keep their money coming in. He was their cash cow, after all.
How didn’t she see it? Or was it that she chose not to?
She sits up when she hears Jason’s keys in the lock and flicks on the TV—another station—a silly movie.
Footsteps. He comes into the TV room, shoes still on, and plunks down on the sofa nearby, feet on the table.
His eyes are wild, hair greasy but slicked back.
He runs his hands over the stubble forming around his chin. “It’s over. It’s all over.”
Does he know? Bambi wonders. Agnes has always been good at keeping things from him. But then he grabs the remote and changes the channel to the news without a word. CCTV footage. LaMonte’s spokesperson talking next to footage of her on set from an earlier film.
“Sources claim that LaMonte is filing rape charges, and LionDale Pictures has dropped Jason Redfern’s contract, effectively putting the duo’s latest release—The Hurting Game—on the shelf.”
Jason turns up the volume. His phone rings.
“Agnes. It’s a fucking shit show. Where is Allison? We need her getting interviews. Now.”
“Sweetie, just calm down. We’ll get Allison on it, okay?”
He flicks the phone on speaker and eyes Bambi as he paces the living room, talking.
“Of course I didn’t see the cameras. How could I? How the fuck was I to know I was being set up? Can’t we make this go away?”
A pause. “Did you do it, Jase?”
“Of course I didn’t do it. I never touched her, Agnes.”
Bambi is sure she can hear Agnes breathing in a cigarette. “Did you rape her?”
“Absolutely not.”
Eyes flash to her, and Bambi feels sick. She stays put, watching him, the whites of his eyes growing larger.
“Well, she doesn’t see it that way, honey,” Agnes intones.
“Co-stars get close. It happens. But I never hurt her. Not that way.”
“I get it,” Agnes says. “But the public won’t. As far as they are concerned, this isn’t about infidelity. It’s about rape, and they think you did it. They believe her.”
“Jesus Christ. We fucked, okay? But that isn’t rape, Agnes. You know this. How do you have on-set chemistry without chemistry?”
Agnes is silent. “Jason, they are claiming you assaulted her. Do you understand? That this happened repeatedly on set. Other women want to come forward.”
“What women?”
Agnes sighs. “I don’t know. Other women. Women who claim you did the same to them.”
“Bullshit!” Jason shouts, his voice breaking. “There were no others.”
Agnes sighs, the change in her palpable. “Cut the shit, okay? We both knew this was going to come out sooner or later.”
“So that’s it, huh? Just like that?”
“Well, no, that isn’t it. But it doesn’t look good for me to be representing you anymore,” says Agnes.
Jason sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Agnes. Please. Don’t do this. I need you.”
“Graham will stay on, but I’m done, Jason. Understand? I’m dropping you.”
“Fuck! Agnes!”
Agnes coughs, a final little sputter. “Goodbye, Jason.”
He hurls the phone across the room, his body panting as if he might cry, but he doesn’t. Bambi curls up and sinks deeper into the chair. He turns to her. “I want an interview. Tomorrow. Call Allison and tell her to make it happen.”
“What? I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
His fist slams down on the table. “Get Allison and get me an interview, Bambi. Something big. CNN. Fox. ABC. I don’t give a shit. Just get me an interview so that I can put this whole thing to bed.”
“Jason, why don’t you sleep on it?”
He sits on the edge of the couch and drops the phone onto the coffee table before leaning in. “I swear to God. I am going to go to the press tomorrow. And I can either do it with your help or without your help. Get Allison to call everyone she knows. I’m doing a live interview tomorrow.”
He picks up the centerpiece off their coffee table and throws it across the room, where it shatters against the far wall, breaking a picture of the two of them.
Bambi takes in a sharp breath and pulls the blanket around her tighter.
Eyes closed, he leans back. Then in one quick movement, he leaps up and goes into the kitchen.
Bottle opening. Glass. Pour. He returns with a drink.
Jason knocks back the glass and gets up.
He pours a second. In moments, he returns, his eyes calmer but dark.
She watches him silently as he paces the room, aware that all the moments when he would drink, the late nights with the crystal glasses, the bourbon, whiskey, the expensive bottles of Scotch sent from abroad, were a kind of admission.
A quiet indulgence for when he had been unfaithful to her, the tonic to numb away his guilt, sip by sip.
She thinks back in time to try and remember when it began, but she can’t quite place it. She just knows that the drinking grew with his career—the stories, the rumors, the whispers.
“Did you love any of them?” Bambi finds herself asking.
Jason looks at her, eyes vacant. “What, Bambs?”
“I said, did you love any of them? The actresses?”
He leans back, eye closed, and finishes his drink.
“I love you. That’s all. Isn’t that enough?
” A line delivered, just like in one of his films. She almost wants to yell, “Cut! That’s a wrap.
” Because it is. It is over. There is literally nothing else to say.
Her cheek pulses and aches. He stares at her, but stares past her, like she isn’t even there.
In the mirror across the room, he searches for his reflection, and Bambi cringes as he admires himself.
He loves himself, even now.
But does he love her?
Perhaps love to Jason isn’t real, just something he pretends. The real thing inside him was never akin to love but something like possession. Bambi holds the tiny bulge of her abdomen. If he knew …
She doesn’t want anyone to get hurt, but Jason would never stop otherwise.
He would never let her go.