A Sunday Denouement

We were sitting in the very same living room where I’d sat, pining, nearly four years ago. Pining despite the fact that the object of my affection had been in the room with me then. It was spring; my best friend’s birthday and I had to get ready for her party. I had to leave. My day with this man had to come to an end.

That day ended. Grasping years snapped by. He went his way and I struggled to – I won’t say repair – to maintain a broken heart. Eventually, he went back to the one who’d broken his heart.

I’d never fallen for anyone so hard in my life. I processed it and analyzed it to the hilt in the intervening years but I still held onto the hurt. He was everything I could have ever possibly wanted – more. Like ‘wildest dreams’ more. And I could never have him.

It didn’t matter really that when I thought of how he’d really treated me in the day to day, he hadn’t been that amazing. Nor did I factor in his casual disregard for me as a person as he’d looked through me back to her. I was stuck on what he would have meant. I’d have been someone if I’d gotten him. I’d have been better than all the girls from high school, better than skinnier girls or richer girls or anyone. After all, he was famous and important in Hollywood.

Even though in my pining I swore that I loved him for who he was, in truth I'd held on to who I’d have gotten to be if he were mine.

After he went back to her, I dated other people too. I suppose in a practical sense I’d gotten over him. I still satirized him in my scripts. Or used his name as the impossible goal of my lovelorn protagonist. But after nursing my open wound for so many years the truth was I didn’t know how to stitch it shut.

I’d see stories about him in the trades or sometimes the tabloids. “That could have been mine,” I’d twist the knife. I’d meet good guys. “Yeah, you’re alright. But you’re not famous. Or rich. Like he was. You’re a mere mortal. How can that ever do?"

And the knife would twist when I’d see movie posters with her face – because of course, she was a model. Beauty products advertised by her fine features. Everywhere. And how could I compete? The old ‘what has she got that I haven’t got?’ argument sort of falls flat. Um, endorsement deals, starring roles, fame and fortune, for starters. And, oh yeah, him.

The years drag on. My wound dries but does not close. Not all the way. I meet a lovely man of my own. I see a light. I start to forget the wound. I like the sound of the life he talks about but who am I if not she who bears this wound: the hurt of the might-have-been?

And then one day through a scheduling coincidence we’re sitting in that very same living room. It’s caught all of us off guard. The four of us: the Director, the Model, my boyfriend and myself. Like four normal people. Like two couples would sit. And chat. About the weather. About movies. The Model and I remind each other of a song and each sing a snippet. I can see how she looks like me – what he saw in me. But her eyes are more china blue than mine.

He reaches for her and there is a kindness in that touch and a thankfulness for it. He glances to me and the look says “I’m glad. To see you. And I’m glad things are like this.” And somehow, seeing that contentment did more than holding onto the times he wasn’t perfectly nice to me, or the psychoanalysis of ‘why her over me?’ or the cold comfort of how my life is far grander without his hollow trappings of fame. I see his look and how they are together and I am glad too. The wound closes and I am glad. It feels like it’s been closed a long time as I hold the hand of the man who loves me.

Suddenly, I want them to be together. And happy with each other. That world of what-if I used to imagine with the Director recedes to the dullness of a thousand other what-if roads that line the shoulders of the road I’m actually on.

We’re sitting like four people in a living room would. And I am suddenly acutely aware of my own vast good fortune. And their fame and money does not give their lives an ounce of sparkle over mine. Over ours. I am acutely aware of the beauty of the man sitting beside me; the one who does hold my hand and treat me kindly. The one who wishes my road be the same as his.

He and I leave the living room and we go off down this road and I am glad. And still glad that for a time my road lost itself in that of the Director. The holding-on is no longer of a wound but of a friend – of living. And now just like that – the spell was broken.

A Love of Bones

The funny thing about being in a relationship is the things you lose. I’m not talking about freedoms or me-time or options of dating other people. I staunchly believe the first two can be worked into any healthy relationship. The last one, hopefully, is something you’re only too glad to give up if this thing is going to be worth your time.

I’m talking about the strange little bones of sorrow which, it is suddenly clear to me, I actually enjoyed gnawing on. Who am I if not the girl who had her heart broken by Mr. Fancy Pants Director? What a great story I got to rehash to the girls over key lime martinis. I dutifully played the part of the wronged innocent. More importantly, defining myself in this way showed I had been through something uniquely Hollywood. I had valiantly attempted to rescue a man from the shallow trappings of his own fame and had had my Cinderella slippers handed to me with a copy of Variety announcing his rekindling with the Super Model. Ah, the stuff Chick Lit novels are made of. I wore my all-too-predictable broken heart like a badge of honor.

What about my ex-fiancé, the budding super-agent, who’d said he could never leave New York when I couldn’t bear to live there a moment longer? The same one who’d met and married an NBC exec and moved out here with her the next year? I got a lot of mileage out of the whole “it’s not you, it apparently really is me” thing.

My wallowing wasn’t reserved for the famous or well-connected either. I was connected via email with my very first love. We’d met while I was on my junior year abroad in Italy. Yes, a bona fide Italian Love Story. More recently, I loved to look at the happy pictures of he and his wife and chastise myself. Yes, I was sure he was really the one good one that got away. That’s when it actually all went wrong for me. I hadn’t actually had a prayer of finding Mr. Right since college! Silly girl. Time to start collecting cats.

Several months ago though, something in me pushed me back out into the dating world. I didn’t think I was ready to let go of my sorrow bones but maybe I could put them in storage a while.

Then my world underwent a shift of seismic proportions. Now I find myself in a relationship with a man who is wonderful in his own ways that outstrip the fairy tale worlds I built up around those previous adventures in heart break. He’s loving and generous and smart. He makes me laugh and I make him laugh. The icing on the cake is that he’s so gorgeous my knees get weak when he smiles at me. But the core of it is he cares about my dreams. They have become important to him. And one morning near the start of "us" he was telling me about a dream life goal of his and it hit me: I want that for him. And I will do whatever it takes to help him get his dream even as he helps me reach mine. In that moment of commitment things shifted for me.

Several weeks ago I heard from a friend that the Director had suffered a death in the family. I dashed off a condolence note to him without even thinking. Without calculating. Without needing to get a response. Just as you do for a friend with a sad heart. And when, to my surprise, I got a response, it was like a smile from a friend. No tug at the heartstrings. No pit in my stomach. The spell was truly broken. The pined-for day dream of being with him pales in comparison to the reality of being with someone invested in my dreams.

I’m no longer some naïve girl with a broken heart. I can’t lay claim to the title of “girl who was wronged.” Of course, it’s part of my life experience but it’s not the defining experience. I now get to create a new title; something along the lines of “girl who loves and is loved.”

It struck me how like an addiction it was; the enjoyment of sucking the marrow out of those sorrow bones. I kind of miss them. But now I can do what you’re supposed to do with bones: put them in a little box and bury them. And those experiences become exactly what they ought to be for a girl like me: fodder for writing.

An Important Dessert

I have discovered an important distinction this week. The kind of thing that you didn’t know you didn’t get until something shined a light on its absence. For example: you love ice cream, you eat it whenever you can. Then one day someone gives you a nice mousse. Now you’ve never had mousse before and people have described it for you as cool but not as cold as ice cream and lighter than ice cream so you figure you have an idea about what to expect from mousse. But until you take that first spoonful and let it melt on your tongue, you really can’t say you know what mousse is like.

The important distinction that I suddenly see in high relief is the difference between loving at someone and loving with someone. It’s like someone handed me a bowl of mousse and asked “Now do you see how this is not the same as Ben and Jerry’s?” Yes, yes I see, sensei of frozen treat metaphors.

Examples from my past in the loving at paradigm parade before me like a slide show:

The selfish man who never asked me how my day was but filled our evenings with orations on the minutiae of his day.

The skier who said he’d teach me to ski so we could spend weekends together and then told he was tired of teaching his girlfriends to ski after I’d bought all the gear.

The Director who genuinely seemed to like me until a shinier, easier object came along and all my whispered prayers and fervent cute messages wouldn’t bring him back.

I’ll even say there is a mid category of loving near someone. Those where you both really have good intentions and there is perhaps great care between you but the threads that bind you aren’t strong enough to withstand the gales of maturation or even the breezes of doubt. Those ones where it could have worked out and you are even confused as to why it didn’t. There was nothing really wrong, per se. But time clouds how much was right; distorts it from mountains to molehills depending on how much you feel the need to chastise yourself at that moment of remembering.

Then there is the delicately whipped chocolate raspberry mousse of loving with. The one where you are both heading in the same direction. You both come to it with open hearts and sharing minds. You both think well yes, there may be things – there will be things that go out of whack and we’ll deal with them. You both take one hundred percent responsibility for the delicate newborn creature growing between you rather than waiting for the other to do their share. You feel a sense of freedom when you’re together; a sense of home. You don’t wonder if you are good enough or doing enough or perfect enough because there is that someone who loves you just as you are and it is a complete revelation. And the privilege of loving back in kind is thrilling. And the rest of your life is for discovery. And all those times you left the party alone, felt a gift go unappreciated, watched him kiss someone else – they all melt into dues paid and life lived. If this is what they lead to you wouldn’t change a single heartbreak.

That's Amore

“A house like this? Oh, say two hundred thousand dollars. Less even.”

Francis Mayes of “Under the Tuscan Sun” authorship was pointing to a slide of a run down Italian farm house. I had gone to see her speak at my small mountain town bookstore. Me and all the other Italo-philes in town with dreams of someday getting our own slice of Tuscan sun.

I was in the midst of house hunting in the mountains but suddenly there was this possibility. Instead of making a practical real estate investment in the little property boom town where I actually lived, I could use that same money – less even – to buy a stone structure in another country where I did not live with no working plumbing, electricity and perhaps not even a road. I was beside myself with excitement.

Having spent junior year abroad many moons ago, I have always been obsessed with getting back to Italy. To live. I have taught Italian. I have compiled an intended coffee table book with my Italy photography and essays on Italian life. When I yell at other LA drivers, it’s in Italian. It just sounds better. Each screenplay I write has references to if not major story arcs in Italy. My weekend treat is to fix myself a latte with my Italian coffee maker and listen to CDs of some of the bands I befriended during my year there. (Amazing how far a smile and an “I’m a DJ from LA” will get you). In short, I’m obsessed and I have been since I was sixteen and first set foot in Italy.

What is it about Italy? Life. They value family and friends over possessions. Art and culture are part of everyday living. The food is amazing, the language is mellifluous, the landscape is breathtaking. Life seems to have more value and richness there.

Several years after that reading of Ms. Mayes’, I own no property in any town and rent a small apartment in the Hollywood hills. But I still think of Italy daily. Is it possible to feel intense homesickness for a place you are not from?

When I saw the KCRW drawing to win tickets to the “Cinema Italian Style” festival at the Egyptian theatre, I entered right away. And I won. I raced into the courtyard of the Egyptian that first night like a starving person to a banquet. Sure I’d get to see some movies, great. But I’d get to be around Italians. Lots of them. For two weeks running. Maybe I’d find a connection, a way back at last to my promised land.

Hearing Italian all around me I squealed and wandered the crowd with a goofy grin on my face. As hoped, the festival had drawn out all the local Italians and other American fools like me. My junior year was brought full circle to me when I ran into a friend who’d been in my dorm that year. He was actually Croatian but close enough. He’d been determined to marry a California girl and get here and so he had.

I’m learning that this town works on attitude and connections. If you pretend you know what you are doing, most people will buy it and if you know the right people, they’ll definitely buy it. When one of the biggest Italian film stars took the red carpet press line, a gasp went up from the girls. He was hot. Un gran bel figo. And married. But I figured it would be cool to meet him, make that connection. And I could, because he had been in a movie by the Big Deal Director. I kicked myself for not having a copy of my latest Italian script with me to hand him.

I marched through the fans right up to him with my hand out. I greeted him in Italian. His face registered “Please don’t hurt me, tall American” until I dropped The Director’s name. Suddenly, this Italian God’s eyes brightened, he grasped my hand and said it was lovely to meet me. We laughed about the Director. The God’s wife, who was equally lovely, told me they’d love to have dinner with him. Ever so usefully, I passed the Director’s number along to them. Here I was, in the middle of an international film power connection. I felt so damn smug.

Later, at the after-party, I chatted briefly with the God’s wife again. It was thrilling to just have access to fame simply because I had the right name to drop. I’d met several new Italian friends that night and saw them watch my apparently effortless ease in getting this access.

I found out later that the God and his wife never got around to calling the Director so he wouldn’t know I’d dropped his name. I was hoping they would. I wondered if he’d wonder about me and all the circulating I was doing. Then I realized, only someone who really doesn’t have carte blanche access to such strata of the business would wonder such a thing.

I have a great teacher here who says in the most satisfying stories, often when our protagonist lets go of what she wants, she gets what she needs. In the end, I got just what I needed out of the festival. I saw some truly fabulous new films (Romanzo Criminale, La Bestia nel Cuore, Quando Sei Nato Non Puoi Piu Nasconderti, Ma Quando Arrivano Le Ragazze?, La Vita Che Vorrei) And was reminded again that the nature of film storytelling doesn’t necessarily have to follow the rigid American Structure most of our films adhere to.

More importantly, I have embarked on some new friendships with Italians who share my film dreams. And better yet, they understand a different approach to life and movies that many of my American friends miss. Plus they appreciate my Italian coffee maker.

One of my new friends took me to a dinner last week with other Italians. Of course, they were all wonderful. One diminutive woman with a spunky joie de vivre informed me she knows my very favorite Italian rock star and can introduce me when he’s next in LA. Her husband, an American with an obvious love of all things Italian turned out to be a director. I told him about my latest Italian script idea. “Let’s see it when you’re done. I’d love to shoot something in Italy,” he said. You and me both, amico.

Though I am now further in terms of miles from the place I dream of living, I am feeling more and more that I am just where I need to be. Every night, as I walk my dog and take stock of my day, I greet the moon with a “Ciao, Luna.” I figure if the moon speaks anything, it’s probably Italian.

A Guardian Butterfly

Part of moving to a big city like L.A. is having a more diverse community, meeting people you just wouldn’t have access to at home. People besides Brad Pitt. I have lived in a lot of places and have met all kinds of people. Even living in New York and being engaged to a Jewish man did not prepare me for Aidel.

During my first month here, I spent one of my pre-employment days of leisure at the DMV switching my license and my plates to the California variety. I was thumbing through a friend’s script in the waiting area when a soft voice at my side asked “what’s that?” Surprised to meet someone in this town who didn’t recognize a script at fifty paces, I spent the next two hours discussing life with this tiny, orthodox Jewish Israeli woman with the impish glint in her eyes.

Only a few years older than me, she told me about her four children and her American husband. She told me about the crazy way her parents had met in London high society and fled to Israel during the war. She told me about some cousin or other that was supposedly a big deal producer in town.

For some reason I felt completely at home with her. I told her about everything. She seemed genuinely delighted to get inside my life and not in the “what can you do for me?” way of LA. But in the way a child listens to you read a story because you are giving her access to a new world.

After that day at the DMV, we’d meet every month or so and sit and talk. It was always at her house.

“I need time with my friend,” she’d shoo her kids out of the room.

It was early in these meetings that I began to realize Aidel was different from me in ways other than her Jewishness. I’d tell her I’d spoken with my mom about my latest script idea and she’d tell me that my mother was about to go through a big change and that she’d make a move that would surprise us. Later that year my mom went through a divorce, radiation, and then moved to New York City, a place she’d professed too big a fear of to visit when I’d lived there just a few years earlier.

I hate to use the word ‘psychic,’ especially in conjunction with the word ‘friend’ as that conjures up visions of Dionne Warwick. Later, when I finally met her sister, she referred to it as Aidel’s gift. Whatever it was, it was at times unsettling and always accurate.

Usually the first thing she’d ask me about was my love life. I had told her about my Jewish ex, the Agent Man, and my time in New York.

“I was his shickza” I laughed.

Her face clouded. “Don’t use that word. It’s not kind.”

For as much as I’d learned about Judaism, I knew so little about Jewishness.

I remember later reporting excitedly to her about a man I was dating. He was European - always a source of points with me - and from a very rigidly ethical background.

She sighed and without ceremony said “No, he’s not the one for you.”

I sputtered and protested that yes, I thought he was. She calmly waited until I was done and then proceeded to tell me why he wasn’t the right one.

“He doesn’t appreciate your humor or your sense of life.”

I got quiet and we talked about other things. I felt like a petulant teenager.

I stopped calling or coming by so often. I told myself it was because I felt like such an outsider in her world and I didn’t want to upset things by calling on a day I didn’t know was a Jewish holiday or come by not dressed conservatively enough. But really, I didn’t want her to be right anymore.

One day this boyfriend and I were driving and, as usual, I was singing along to every song and doing goofy car-dance moves. I thought it would make him laugh. My sister and I always cracked each other up this way. Instead, he reached over and slammed the radio off. I froze and heard Aidel’s voice in my head. He may as well have told me to stop being me. The relationship held on for a few more months but I think I knew it was over right then. I called Aidel and she told me she couldn’t see me, she was sick.

It was a while before she called me again. Finally, she was well enough and wanted to see me. I came over and told her she’d been right about the boyfriend. She smiled quietly. She was bony and rail thin and I worried my hug hurt her. She never spoke to me of cancer. For as much as she wanted to delve into my life, it seemed she felt there were parts of hers she needed to keep from me. She dodged my questions after her well-being and asked about my life. I said my sister had met a guy. Aidel told me she’d move somewhere hot. A week later, my sister called to tell me she was moving to Arizona for this guy.

I saw Aidel less after that. It depended if she was well enough. I would never have minded to see her in any health but I think it embarrassed her to be seen so frail when she’d been so vivacious. She never wanted to need help.

She called me one Monday. She needed to go to her doctor. It was a Jewish holiday: Shavuot. This meant no one but a non-Jew could drive her. When I pulled up to the door, I was greeted by looks of distrust by the neighbors. It had only been about a month since I’d last seen her but the Aidel that emerged from the building made my voice catch in my throat. Her husband did not smile at me as he helped her into my low sports car. I wondered if it was from his own distress watching his wife waste away or the same distrust of outsiders I’d read on the neighbors’ faces.

As we drove to her doctor’s clinic she explained that they’d disagreed about her even going to the doctor or riding in a car on the holiday but she felt her life was more important than the holiday. God would understand. I cursed my sport suspension which jounced her birdlike body over every bump.

“It’s fine,” she soothed, “with the morphine I don’t feel it.”

She would not let me carry her up the stairs to the clinic though she could not have weighed more than eighty-five pounds. She insisted she could do it herself. I steadied her and she did a sideways shuffle up the wheelchair ramp since she couldn’t get her legs to lift forwards. I watched them inject her with an experimental stem cell potion. After, she seemed to walk more steadily, clinging to my arm as we made our way back to the car.

At this point in our friendship, I saw no point in sugar-coating anything. “Are you scared to die?”

“No.”

“Are your kids scared?”

“They are prepared.”

There was so much I wanted to understand about her life and her spirituality. So much I wanted to apologize for in my absences. How could I tell her how much I valued her when I’d never really shown it?

“Any new men?” she asked as her head lolled on my passenger seat.

“No.” Then I told her about letting go of my delusions with the Director.

“He’s British,” she smiled, “and tall, yes?”

“Yes, 6’4””

I held my breath. I hadn’t wanted to bring him up. I didn’t want to have her tell me what I already knew: move on.

“He is the one for you. It will be a good life together. Just give him space”

My vision blurred and I had to focus on gripping the steering wheel. A few months before, that news would have been welcome but now it was like a punch in the stomach. Dreaming of him had suffocated me. Was I supposed to open back up to that hope and hurt? I concentrated on the road.

We arrived at her door and I wanted to tell her I loved her. But I didn’t. She brought me inside and insisted on peeling me a grapefruit for helping her. I cried all the way back to work.

The next phone call I got was not from Aidel. A month later I turned my phone on as my flight from New York landed. I’d been visiting my mom in her improbable new life. A voice I didn’t know told me that Aidel had passed away and there was a memorial that night if I could make it.

Not knowing what else to do, I grabbed a large scarf out of my suitcase and wrapped it around my head and shoulders. I stood in the back of the Yeshiva and listened to the soothing sounds of the Hebrew prayers. I really had believed that she would get better and always be there to talk to as I grew my Hollywood life. I was in shock.

Later, a woman I’d met at the memorial called to tell me when the family was planning to sit Shiva. I panicked and called all my Jewish friends. What do I bring? What do I wear? How do I act at an orthodox Shiva? Even my least reformed Jewish friend didn’t know. I worried I’d offend the family by showing up as an outsider. Then I decided I had to go just out of love for Aidel.

The only death ritual I know is the Catholic wake where everyone needs to eat. I bring a bag of fresh fruit with me, the only thing I can be sure is kosher. I enter their modest house and find the men and women gathered in separate rooms. I sit with the women, awkwardly holding my fruit until someone takes it and puts it on a table.

We are silent for a while until Aidel’s sister sits on the couch facing me. She looks at me with the same wide grey eyes as Aidel; still and glinting at the same time. I introduce myself.

“Oh, you are Heidi.”

She explains to me that when they asked Aidel to make a list of who she wanted at her Shiva, mine was the first name she had said. Me. Why? What had I given her? Not half of what she had given me. I breathe through my mouth to keep from crying.

We sit for a while longer before another friend prompts Aidel’s oldest, a twelve year old daughter, to ask me about her mother. The girl takes up a pad and pen.

“I’m making a memory book,” she explains. She looks like she’s tired of people waiting for her tears.

I tell her about how I’d met her mother in the DMV and the unique friendship she’d brought to my life.

I talk about Aidel always lending me books she wanted me to read. Most had been about Jewish history. She’d been torn about lending me one because “the narrator had some anger at the Germans he escaped from.” She knew I had a German background.

“I think he had a right to be angry,” I’d told her.

Aidel had lent me the book, laughing about all the Germans in her life now and how she never would have imagined she would have Germans as friends; people who helped her family’s well-being rather than hurt it.

The women laugh as I come to a stop. How could I explain to this girl what her mother had given me? How Aidel’s gift terrified me, challenged me and thrilled me all at once? Her earnest grey eyes fix on me, pen poised.

“She was a butterfly,” I finally say. “She was a beautiful soul that flew into my life for little while.”

She nods and writes. How can I tell her I feel just as lost without her mother as she does?

Her sister watches me watching Aidel’s daughter write.

“Did you know her Hebrew name?”

I shake my head.

“Schlomit,” the sister tells me. “It means ‘Complete’.”

I start crying.

As the months have passed I have thought of Aidel on nearly a daily basis. I wonder how her family is managing without her. No doubt they’ve been embraced by their community and though they surely miss her, they are managing. Selfishly, I wonder how Aidel could have left me with so many questions unanswered. The most burning of them: how could she have been wrong about the Director? I tell myself the morphine must have scrambled her reception.

Sometimes I talk to her. I ask her if she sees things I see. I tell her I miss her. I ask her what I should do about whatever is going on today. Last night, I watched a fluffy love story where the lovers loved passionately but had to go through trials of fire to finally be together. It was silly overall but I was inspired by the main idea of a love like that…that does not alter when it alteration finds.

Later, I turned off my bedside lamp and asked Aidel if she was there. I asked her what fires I have to go through to find that love. In the next moment I heard a faint but clear whisper:

“You are burning now.”

Romantic Comedy or Drama?

Way back in the misty epoch of January, I had the good fortune to go to Mexico for a company conference. While there I met this Big Deal Director. I thought he was engaged to one of my favorite models so I blithely chatted away with him till the wee hours, happy to be utterly myself. Since he was taken, there was no need to impress or strategize.

The next day however, my intrepid (read: nosy) colleagues Googled everything they could think of about him and came up with the surprising revelation that he was in fact not engaged, hadn’t been for months, and IMDB doesn’t update its facts very often.

Subsequently, I turned into a complete fluffy dork around him. He was after all gorgeous, intelligent, witty, successful, well-mannered, everything-on-dream-list and OhMyGod what if he fell in love with little-old-me? Adding fuel to the fire, when I coyly suggested he change his travel plans to stay till the end of the week like I was, he did. After all, things had started with Agent Man on a vacation. Maybe this was The Next One. Ooo! Maybe this was The One! Delusions of grand relationship beginnings danced in my head. Poor man thought he was just having himself a fling.

“Silly girl! What would your boss think?” You ask.
“Not just boss,” I correct you, “whole department.”

I knew there were possible job damning politics afoot but I figured everyone would forgive if it was “real.” Don’t we put everything aside for that which is “real?” We do in movies. Despite my protestations that I’m a good girl I’m pretty sure that’s why I’m not on the list for this year’s company trip.

The funny thing is I honestly did have a bout of morality at the time. Believe me, I was tempted. The man is very skilled. And gorgeous and witty and…But at the last minute, it hit me that I didn’t want to be just another notch on his infamous bedpost. I wanted to matter to him. I would distinguish myself by not sleeping with him. It was beautiful Mexico after all and after my twelve hour work days (who needs sleep?) there were entire nights to talk and share with each other and build that romantic base of friendship that would undoubtedly sustain us on our life of love. Cue violins…

Despite all evidence to the contrary, I am not delusional. After the Hollywood pretense fell away, he actually shared something of himself with me. I wonder now if he meant to. Beneath all the name and money crap was just a nice guy with a heart like anyone else. A pretty likable heart at that.

We did have fun together. We laughed a lot and I don’t think he minded my chastity too terribly. But when I gave him my number at the airport, he reciprocated with his assistant’s number and a look of “Oh God please don’t ever call me.” So I didn’t. Nope, I thought, I’m gonna be the girl who didn’t sleep with you and didn’t call you. Clever strategy, no?

After a few weeks of radio silence I got a text from him and my heart stopped. When I could again breathe, I texted back something deliciously witty in the moment for which I slapped my forehead the next moment. And so on. For months he’d text or call when ever he was in town. I’d think Ooooo! Maybe he sees something here after all. And I’d get all excited. And then get all heartbroken again, when he didn’t call again. Or when I found out again that he was instead with the latest shiny object (model/starlet) on whatever shoot he’d gone off to. I’d wonder what I was doing wrong. I found myself being exceedingly careful to be fabulous around him. It’s a fun cycle: hope, self-doubt and heartbreak. I highly recommend it to anyone looking to get some meat to draw on for real emotion in your writing.

It dawned on me that if we truly were meant to be, there was nothing I could do to mess it up so I might as well be myself. He still didn’t call and I figured it was time to listen to the message the Universe was giving me. I sent back a sweater I’d poached (oh but it smells like him! – gag) and I finally let go of my daydreams of an amazing romance.

My boss asked me “Did you really think something serious was going to work out with this guy?”
I smiled and told him that “Yes, yes I had.”

I had believed that he might like the idea of being with someone who valued him for him, not for who he has to be for Hollywood.

Then I realized the funny thing about dream guy lists. I had left the kicker off mine: must be crazy in love with me. The fact that the Director is missing that vital item pretty much negates the rest of the list and it took me a while to see that. I guess I was blinded by the Hollywood stuff after all. In the end I’m relieved things are as they are now. The gossamer treacle of daydreams can only sustain you for so long. After a while some good hearty living-in-the-now is much more satisfying.

I’m sure the Director laughed plenty at my naiveté’. But though I would have been hurt to know that before, he’s not wrong. It’s much easier when you can laugh at yourself. A silly, lovelorn girl who crazily believes her own Cinderella story is pretty funny. Especially if she’s a flawed but loveable protagonist. Now if I could just find some talking mice who know how to sew.

And just for the record IMDB still lists the Director as engaged. That’s probably for the best.