Jeremy Thrane by Kate Christensen Page A

her hair with both hands, slid out of her sweater, and slung it and her bag over the table by the door. “Brr,” she said, coming into the room to greet her devoted husband’s old friend and longtime employee, “it’s getting chilly out. It’s great to be here. Like real fall. Jeremy, hi, it’s so good to see you again, it’s been what. Five years? Wow.”
    I stood and allowed her to buss me on both cheeks, making an effort to buss her back but managing only to stir the air by her cheeks because of the angles of our heads. We seated ourselves; she took Ted’s chair, perching on the edge of it and rubbing her hands together in the warmth of the fire. She smelled expensive, and she looked amazing. Her hair fell in artful, luminous, golden fronds around her wide, firm-jawed face. She wore a long-sleeved, form-fitting black silk dress with plum-colored tights and chunky-heeled black leather boots. Her face sparkled and caught the light as if tiny bits of glitter or mica had been spread evenly over her skin.
    “How are you, Giselle?” My hands were trembling; I slid them between my knees.
    “Great!” she said. “Just great. Things have never been better, actually. How ’bout you?”
    “How’s L.A.?”
    “Oh, God, L.A.,” she said with a wave of the hand and a jaded little laugh, both of which seemed to occur not as an expression of any genuine urge or feeling but as a reflex dictated by some imaginary, ever-present camera.
    “L.A.,” agreed Ted with a laugh that was a deeper echo of hers.
    They’d excluded me from their life in L.A., so I had nothing to sayto this. Also, I sensed a flash of something telegraphed between them again as fast as an electrical pulse.
    She was saying to me, “It’s been such a crazy summer, Ted’s probably filled you in.”
    “No,” I said in my homo voice. “Do tell.”
    She delivered what I immediately gathered was a practiced monologue about the movie industry or, at least, the attitude toward it she had taken it upon herself to manifest, a darkly charming flippancy concerning the pitfalls, labors, negotiations, and machinations of playing a character in front of the cameras.
Catch as Catch Can
had been filmed almost entirely in London; she loved making movies in London, it felt so authentic, as opposed to soundstages in L.A., which removed her from real life and made her feel sort of like a zoo animal. She loved watching passersby while she played a scene on a blocked-off street; when they recognized her, they would do a tiny double take, and then play it very cool. The English were so great that way. To them she was an actor, not a movie star. The premiere Monday night promised to be an enormous publicity event; her next film was due to start shooting in Maui the following month. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She was a refractive surface, a lake on a windy day, all surface motion and play of light that hid whatever depths lay below, so you wouldn’t want to dive in headfirst without checking.
    But under her skin-and-bones polish, her sleekly aggressive aplomb, was Cathy Benitez with her unfortunate perm and Valley-girl baby fat, going to the mall with her girlfriends, French-smoking menthols; occasionally, Giselle’s veneer cracked to reveal an occasional dropped “g,” a fleeting suburban gawkiness, a vestigial “so fucking what?” quirk of the upper lip. But these flaws were the key to her allure; they evinced the efforts of self-invention and also its success. She was quite a little masterpiece, I thought.
    When I looked beyond her to where Ted was standing, bottle of gin in his hands, the knowledge of what was going on hit me in several stages—first, the immediate bolt of recognition, then a gradual soaking-in, and finally there it was, complete and undeniable, solid as a rock in my mind. I’d never quite realized how married they were. I’d assumedthe whole thing was a phony, polite sham for them both. Suddenly, I felt clunky and dull. Ted was right,