***
Runyon Canyon is the celebrity-prone park above Los Angeles, which has featured in countless of movies and series, especially from the 80s. The fact that it’s near high-end neighborhoods like the Hollywood Hills makes it possible to run into a celebrity at any time and if you were lucky you might even have stumbled upon the Johnsons taking an evening walk or a morning jog.
I parked the black Range Rover and B walked out in her velvety blue Juicy Couture track suit and adjusted her pants and her hair. I had told her the outfit wasn’t in fashion anymore and that it made her look like a big baby in overalls, but she said she loved the material too much to let it go. And let’s face it, when your new claim to fame is vomiting on one of the bigger televised awards in the calendar year, showing up in a three-year-old tracksuit is not going to do much to your reputation. I was wearing a grey t-shirt with “Who let the dogs out” in big block letters, so perhaps it wasn’t the right time to be pointing out fashion mistakes.
B started walking down the so called Star trail with verve, her long legs striding and picking up speed rapidly and her head focused forwards. She was apparently eager to shed both calories and inner demons and that was a positive sign. You go girl! I thought to myself in my inner gay voice. Every man has an inner gay voice, at least if you spend as much time around a woman (without sleeping with her) as I did.
I jogged a few steps to catch up with her, “Aren’t you an eager beaver today?” I said, trying to keep my voice upbeat. She needed me to be on my A-game today and remind her the world wasn’t ending just because she had literally spilled her guts on TV.
“I’m no beaver, I’m Barney the drunken dinosaur. Please keep the tempo with me, I can’t run into someone today. I just can’t.” B said, annoyed.
She had a fire in her step while I was panting like a dazed Rocky Balboa after 15 minutes. It felt kind of humiliating that she drank alcoholic smoothies for breakfast and still was in much better shape than me, a warning signal to lose my morning chocolate croissant. Not that I would, but I considered the signal.
“How are you feeling back there?” B said, likely noticing the increased intensity in my breathing.
“I’m good, I’m good.” I lied, trying to sound unaffected. “How are you?” I threw right back at her.
“I feel like I’m in a bad dream and I can’t wake up. But otherwise I’m fine.” B was in a sour mood which was very hard to reverse. She had been sinking for some time and it finally seemed like she had submerged herself entirely in misery. It would take a heroic effort to dig her up and to be honest with you, I wasn’t sure I was up for it.
“Did you fart? Something smells nasty,” B said and wrinkled her face in disgust.
“Small one. Sneaked out.” I raised my hands in the air to show my innocence.
“You really need to stop eating all that cheese, Darryl, it’s not good for you.”
Look who’s talking! I felt like saying, because I’d be stupid to take health advice from my closet alcoholic employer. And I happened to love my cheese, wine and novel-reading evenings - it might have made my stomach a bit bubbly, but you’ve got to live sometimes, right?
“Did you talk to A?” B’s voice sounded anxious, but not out of breath. I struggled to keep up with her.
“Yeah, well only a short one, he was polishing his Ferrari.” I said, knowing what her reply would be.
“Now that’s a surprise!” B said. “How much can you polish a car without it losing its color? He never even drives that thing!”
“A man must have his toys, I guess?” I said, not sure how to defend behavior I couldn’t understand, but on the other hand I wasn’t particularly experienced when it came to relationships. I had always been a bit of a loner and around women I automatically seemed to land in the friendship category.
“He doesn’t seem to care one bit about me anymore. He used to be the nicest husband, always bought flowers, jewelry, did the most romantic things. You remember that time when he brought me up on that skyscraper roof in New York and there was a helicopter waiting for us and we flew to a Caribbean island and had a romantic dinner by the ocean?” Yes, I remember being left by the helipad like a fool, I thought to myself and nodded.
B looked out over the rolling hills like the answer to her problem was somewhere over there. Somewhere over the rainbow.
“From flower-petal-trails to scratching his balls openly and only lusting after things with wheels, what an amazing transformation! I used to feel like the most special woman in the world and now I’m like his sister, bucktooth Bree from fucking Oklahoma. I should take a sledgehammer down to that garage!”
What do you say to that? Here was bitterness and disappointment I’d never experienced before, but at the same time expected. The last year they had started to drift apart quite drastically after some major fights and I sometimes wondered how they had made it so far considering how different their personalities were. The banal jock with his cars and protein shakers and the emotional artist with her love for extravagance, yes they were pretty much opposites in everything except for that they were both very, very attractive and successful people. Sometimes that was enough.
At least in the short run.
We jogged the last bit to our regular stretching place and when we stopped I felt like my lungs were trying to launch themselves from my mouth. I was in bad, bad shape. Not fat, but with too much stress, too much wine and not enough exercise. I was maybe a bit unhappy in my own way, not that I had thought about it a lot, but it had slowly started creeping into my head that I might be coming to the end stretch of my employment with B. It was becoming too much work and not enough fun.
B was stretching her leg muscles against a rock and I sat down next to her whilst trying to recapture my breath. “You don’t think he’s retreating to his little man-cave because you’ve been off the rails lately?” I said, leaning back on my role as the mediator and weirdly seeing it as my duty to make sure the couple stayed together. I knew how happy they could be, it had just been a long time since I saw it.
I looked at B’s body and thought to myself how genetically blessed she must be to be able to treat it so badly and still stay so fit and beautiful. She was simply born with that skinny-curvy look that all women want and pay handsomely to get. I couldn’t help but feel a tinge of lust.
“You know what I think?” B said, looking like she had just thought of something brilliant, “I think he’s cheating on me. It would explain everything, the evading behavior, the lack of affection, the night-time jogging, all that. I bet he’s been seeing someone for quite a while. You’d tell me if he was, right?” Her stark blue eyes were studying me and for a second I felt like I was in school, trying to invent some believable lie to explain why I hadn’t finished my homework. But I didn’t have to lie, I knew nothing about A’s love life outside B and my hunch was that he didn’t have any. He just didn’t strike me as the cheating kind.
“Why would he cheat on you? You’re one of the most beautiful women in the world, according to Maxims and many other magazines, and me, and I know he still thinks you’re the love of his life. You just need to work on yourselves and your relationship. It’s not the weirdest thing for couples to go through a rough patch.”
B looked at me like I was trying to sell her a used car with a bad engine and rust in all the places you couldn’t see.
“Thanks for the compliment, Darryl, but that’s bullshit. And in a way I can’t blame him, I look like a toilet brush. I drink too much, smoke too much, do brainless parts in movies I don't even like myself and go to parties to meet people I don't care one bit about. We haven’t had sex in a long time and last time I was barely conscious. Who wouldn't cheat on me?”
“If you’re in that self-loathing frame of mind, there’s no point in talking anymore.” I didn’t want to waste time wading around in B’s well of depression, I knew it wasn’t going to get us anywhere.
“Last question then, if he loves me so god damn much, why isn't
he here? Why is he never around?”
I didn’t know how to reply. Telling her she was hard work wouldn’t cut it, because she knew that already. “I don’t know. Maybe you’ve just hit a rough patch. In Hollywood people sometimes get too stuck in themselves, thinking me, me, me and nothing else and that’s why so many marriages crash faster than you have time to say “I do.” Your five years is pretty fantastic when you think of it, it must mean you have something really special.”
B finally showed me a glimpse of a smile, “How do you do it? How do you always stay so positive?”
“Maybe it's because I don't think so much - guess I'm kind of stupid like that.” I flashed my million-dollar smile. I've got REALLY white teeth you know, proud of 'em too.
B looked down on her fingers and then out over the rolling hills and said: “That's it, isn't it? I worry too much and that's why I needs ma’ wine.”
“Something like it. You ought to stop thinking and drinking and your problems will be shrinking.”
"You’re such a poet, Darryl. All those books you read must do you some good.”
“Books over vodka any time, girl,” I said and touched her shoulder, “Let’s get going again, I think I saw Mr. Gibson walking his dog over there and we don’t want you stuck talking to him about how much in common you have.”
“Shut up,” B said and laughed.
I had managed to bring out a sincere smile on her face.
This is why I was her assistant.