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“You listen to other people’s opinions, you work hard, and I’ll bet you don’t have a malicious bone in your body.”
She thought about Michel and knew that wasn’t true.
“That’s why I had misgivings about you playing Lizzie. She’s a carnivore. The whole concept is foreign to your nature.”
“I’m an actress, Jake. Part of acting is playing a role different from yoursef.” She felt like a hypocrite. She wasn’t an actress. She was a fake, a girl whose freak-show body was mysteriously transformed by the camera into something beautiful.
He ran his fingers through his hair, making it stand up in little spikes along one side. “Lizzie is a hard character for me to talk about. She’s based on a girl I used to know. We were married a long time ago.”
Was Jake, the Greta Garbo of male actors, going to confide in her? Not willingly. He looked angry at having revealed even that small amount of personal history. “What was she like?” she asked.
A muscle in his jaw ticked. “It’s not important.”
“I want to know.”
He took a few steps, then stopped. “She was a man-eater. Ground me up between her pretty little teeth and spit me out.”
The stubbornness that had caused her so much trouble in the past took over. “But there had to have been something that made you fall in love with her.”
He started walking again. “Lay off.”
“I need to know.”
“I said lay off. She was a great fuck, okay?”
“Is that all?”
He stopped and spun on her. “That’s all. Thousands of satisfied customers found happiness between her legs, but the Slovak kid from Cleveland was too ignorant to figure that out, and he lapped her up like a puppy dog!”
His pain hit her like a slap. She touched his arm. “I’m sorry. Really.” He pulled his arm away, and as they ran back to the house in silence, Fleur wondered what kind of person his former wife had been.
Jake’s thoughts were following a similar path. He’d met Liz at the beginning of his freshman year in college. He’d been on the way home from basketball practice when he’d wandered into a rehearsal at the university theater building. She was onstage, the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen, a tiny, dark-haired kitten. He asked her out that same night, but she told him she didn’t date jocks. Her resistance made her even more appealing, and he began hanging out at the theater building between practices. She continued to ignore him. He discovered she was taking a playwriting class the next semester, and he fast-talked his way past the prerequisites into the same class. It changed his life.
He wrote about the men he’d met when he was doing odd jobs in Cleveland’s blue-collar bars. The Petes and Vinnies who’d gradually taken the place of the father he didn’t have, the men who asked him about his schoolwork, and laid into him for cutting class, and one night, when they found out he’d been picked up by the police for trying to steal a car, took him into the alley behind the bar and taught him the meaning of tough love.
The words poured out of him, and the professor was impressed. Even more important, he’d finally drawn Liz’s attention. Because her family was wealthy, his poverty fascinated her. They read Gibran together and made love. He began letting down the walls he’d built around himself. Before he knew it, they’d decided to get married, even though he was only nineteen, and she was twenty. Her father threatened to cut off her allowance, so she told him she was pregnant. Daddy whisked them to Youngstown for a fast ceremony, but when he found out the pregnancy was a sham, he stopped the checks. Jake lengthened his hours working at the town diner when he wasn’t in class or at basketball practice.
A new graduate student enrolled in the theater department, and when Jake came home, he found him sitting with Liz at the gray Formica kitchen table talking about the meaning of life. One night he walked in on them in bed. Liz cried and begged Jake to forgive her. She’d said she was lonely and not used to being poor. Jake forgave her.
Two weeks later he found her down on her knees working over one of his teammates. Her innocence, he discovered, had been shared with legions. He took the keys to her Mustang, headed for Columbus, and enlisted. The divorce papers reached him near Da Nang. Vietnam, coming so soon after Liz’s betrayal, had changed him forever.
When he’d written Sunday Morning Eclipse, Liz’s ghost had come back to haunt him. She’d sat on his shoulder whispering words of innocence and corruption. She’d become Lizzie. Lizzie with her open, innocent face and the heart of a harlot. Lizzie, who bore no resemblance to the beautiful giant of a kid running beside him.
“I was wrong about you. You’re going to be a great Lizzie,” he said, not meaning it. “All you need is a little faith in yourself.”
“Do you really think so?”
“Absolutely.” He reached out and gave her hair a quick tug. “You’re a good kid, Flower Power. If I had a sister, I’d want her to be just like you. Except not such a smart-ass.”
Chapter 11
Jake watched as Belinda gradually won over every male on the set, from the lowliest crew member to Dick Spano to Jake himself. She was always there if someone needed her. She ran lines with the actors, joked with the grips, and rubbed away Johnny Guy’s stiff neck. She brought them all coffee, teased them about their wives and girlfriends, and pumped up their egos.
“The changes you made in DeeDee’s monologue were pure genius,” she told Jake in June, during the second month of shooting. “You dug deep.”
“Shucks, ma’am, it weren’t nothing.”
She regarded him earnestly. “I mean it, Jake. You nailed it. When she said, ‘I give up, Matt. I give up.’ I started to cry. You’re going to win an Oscar. I just know it.”
