Before heading out towards Runyon Canyon, I managed a long and disturbing call with Julianne. Julianne was almost always pissed at something and after the “vomit incident” she obviously had plenty to be angry about. Besides, she didn’t like me much and didn’t understand what my role had become. Before, I was managing and coordinating most of the time, everything from sorting out dry-cleaning, to booking appointments, arranging schedules and plans, and now I delegated most of those things to Fredric and the rest of the team. I had my hands full just being around B and making sure her every wish came true. I was her one-man entourage and had strangely become her link to the rest of the world. Yes, even between her and her husband sometimes.
I put on my tracksuit and headed over to the garage to take out the Range Rover, when I stumbled upon A, polishing one of his many luxurious toys, the Ferrari F430 Scuderia. He looked like he had gotten dressed in a time machine in his tucked-in white t-shirt and tight, stonewashed jeans and cowboy boots. He was an attractive man with a muscular jaw and bulging biceps, but had the dress sense of someone collecting bottles for a living. This was one thing that irked B, but she said that, like most men, he was unchangeable in this respect. He looked up at me and I followed a bead of sweat roll down his forehead with my eyes.
“What’s up, man?” he said. A sometimes talked like he was still in college. Maybe he thought this was how black guys talked, that we couldn’t utter a sentence without inserting words like man or dawg or worse, the dreaded n-word. Since I had worked alongside him for years and was a book worm, he should’ve known better.
“I’m taking her for a walk,” I said, and realized I was talking about his wife like she was a dog. If only she was as well-trained and easy to please.
“That's good. Hope it makes her feel better,” A’s voice came out dead as timber and reflected the emotional investment he had shown for her the last year, at least according to B. He had a knack of retreating down to his four-wheeled friends as soon as the going got rough. And it had been rather rough lately.
“She’s worried you're still angry with her.” I put my hands in my tracksuit pockets and leaned against the door frame. Talking about B with A always made me feel strange, because I was B’s assistant, but at the same time a close friend of both. I didn’t like to take sides or listen to the rants of a married couple in a desperate need of counseling.
A focused his eyes back on the Ferrari logo, the stampeding horse which was now so shiny it looked like it would spring to life and run away by itself. “Well, she can keep on worrying, because I am. She really took it to another level last night. I mean, how would you react in my shoes?”
“Pretty much the same, I guess.” I said, and thought nobody knows what they would do in another person’s shoes, but I didn’t think A’s reaction was strange either. What concerned me was how much he had managed to slip away prior to the vomit. It didn’t strike me like he wanted to fight for their marriage, but even the all-seeing assistant couldn’t know everything of course. There are two sides to every story and naturally I mostly got B’s point of view.
He looked back up at me with his sharp blue eyes and said, “I don’t know what to do anymore. She’s become this other person, so deeply unhappy and strange. It’s not who I fell in love with that’s for sure. She refuses to seek help for it too, like she doesn’t see a problem that’s right in front of her, you know?” A was waiting for a guy response, some agreement, a feeling of camaraderie.
I couldn’t shake the feeling that he was contemplating a divorce. After all it wasn’t the most uncommon thing in Hollywood for people to say, “I’ve had it with you and your obsession with yourself, your constant traveling and your absurdly elevated need for attention,” although it was a mirror image they were talking to. How could you make such a strenuous concept as marriage work in a world so demanding? There are obviously no secrets, only hard work, and my guess was that A had grown tired of working hard for the relationship, he wanted to see some results.
“It’s very frustrating,” I said, feeling uneasy about being sandwiched in between their struggles, “We’re heading out now, I’ll see if I can talk some sense into her.”
“Good luck,” A said without a hint of belief in his voice and returned to his Ferrari, a car that always performed flawlessly, something I’m sure he wished for in his wife.