Open: An Autobiography

Might be time for a haircut, I say.

I ask about the movie Brooke just wrapped in Africa. Does she like being an actress? She talks with passion about the adventure of filmmaking, the fun of working with talented actors and directors, and it strikes me that she’s the polar opposite of Wendi, who never knew what she wanted. Brooke knows exactly what she wants. She sees her dreams and doesn’t falter in describing them, even if she’s having trouble figuring out how to make them come true.

Five years older than I, she’s more worldly, more aware, and yet she also gives off an airy innocence, a neediness, which makes me want to protect her. She brings out the Gil in me, a side I didn’t know I had.

We say most of the same things we’ve said by fax, but now, in person, over plates of pasta, they sound different, more intimate. There is nuance now, subtext, body language, and pheromones. Also, she’s making me laugh, a lot, and making herself laugh. She has a lovely laugh. As with my wrist surgery, three hours pass in a millisecond.

She’s exceptionally kind and sweet about my wrist, examining the inch-long pink scar, touching it lightly, asking questions. She’s also empathetic, because she’s facing surgery too, on both her feet. Her toes are damaged from years of dance training, she says, and doctors will need to break them and reset them. I tell her about Gil standing guard in the operating room with me, and she asks, joking, if she can borrow him.

We discover that, despite our outwardly different lives, we share similar starting points.

She knows what it’s like to grow up with a brash, ambitious, abrasive stage parent. Her mother has been her manager since Brooke was eleven months old. The difference: her mother still manages her. And they’re nearly broke, because Brooke’s career is slumping. The Africa movie was the first big job she’s landed in a while. She does coffee commercials in Europe just to pay the mortgage. She says things like this, startlingly candid, as if we’ve known each other for decades. It’s not only that we’ve softened the ground with faxes. She’s just naturally open, all the time, I can tell. I wish I could be half as open. I can’t tell her much about my own inner torments, though I can’t avoid admitting that I hate tennis.

She laughs. You don’t actually hate tennis.

Yes.

But you don’t hate hate it.

I do. I hate it.

We talk about our travels, our favorite foods, music, movies. We bond over one recent movie, Shadowlands, the story of British writer C. S. Lewis. I tell Brooke that the movie struck a chord with me. There was Lewis’s close relationship with his brother. There was his sheltered life, walled off from the world. There was his fear of risk and the pain of love. But then one singularly brave woman makes him see that pain is the price of being human, and well worth it. In the end Lewis tells his students: Pain is God’s megaphone to rouse a deaf world. He tells them: We are like blocks of stone … [T]he blows of His chisel, which hurt us so much, are what make us perfect. Perry and I have seen the movie twice, I tell Brooke, and we’ve memorized half the lines. I’m moved that Brooke too loves Shadowlands. I’m slightly awed that she’s read several of Lewis’s books.

Well after midnight, lingering over empty coffee cups, we can no longer ignore the impatient stares of the waiters and restaurant owner. We need to go. I drive Brooke home, and on the sidewalk outside her house I have a feeling that her mother is watching us through an upstairs curtain. I give Brooke a chaste kiss and ask if I can call her again.

Please do.

As I walk away she notices a hole in my jeans, at the small of my back. She sticks her finger through the hole, scratching my tailbone with her nail. She flashes a sly grin before running inside.

I drive my rental car along Sunset Boulevard. I’d planned to head back to Vegas, never dreaming the date would go so well or last so long, but it’s too late to catch a flight. I decide to stop for the night at the next hotel I come to, which turns out to be a Holiday Inn that’s seen better days. Ten minutes later I’m lying in a musty room on the second floor, listening to traffic hissing along Sunset and the 405. I try to review the date - and, more importantly, to reach some conclusions about it, about what it means. But my eyelids are heavy. I fight to keep them open, fight as always the loss of control, which feels like the ultimate loss of choice.

15

MY THIRD DATE WITH BROOKE is the night before her foot surgery. We’re in Manhattan, in the ground-floor sitting room of her brownstone. We’re kissing, on the verge, but first I need to tell her the truth about my hair.

She can sense that I have something on my mind. What’s wrong? she asks.

Nothing.

You can tell me.

It’s just that I haven’t been completely honest with you.

We’re lying on a couch. I sit up, punch a pillow, take a breath. Still searching for the right words, I look at the walls. They’re decorated with African masks, eyeless faces with no hair.