Page 75 of My Dead Wife's Ex Will Do
Stella Zedman has been a client for years and we’ve gotten to know each other pretty well. She’s very down-to-earth, especially for a celebrity, and she takes no bullshit, from directors, costars, the press.
No one.
Which makes it damned hard to hide my current distraction from her.
“Okay, what the hell’s going on?” she asks, after I’ve lost count of the number of reps she’s done for the second time.
“Nothing,” I insist. She gives me the look that makes every assistant she’s ever had quake. It doesn’t work on me.
Okay, maybe it works on me a little.
“Guy trouble,” I confess. She’s a lesbian, so I’m hoping this will telegraph that she doesn’t really want to know the details.
“Guy trouble?” She finishes her last set of bench presses and sits up. I toss a towel to her and she wipes the sweat from her face. “What sort of guy trouble?”
“There’s a guy and we can’t be together for various reasons and…it’s troubling, I guess. That’s all.”
“Why can’t you be together?” She moves to the weight rack and I load the plates onto the ends of the bar resting in its rack. She steps into the rack and positions the bar on her shoulders, then grasps the bar, lifts it off the rack, and starts her first set of squats.
“He lives in New York, for one thing.”
“So? You live half the year there, too. You’re going back next week.”
“We have sort of a complicated history.”
“How so?”
“Jesus, woman, if you can interrogate me while lifting, then maybe I should put more weight on.”
“I’m not…” she huffs and pushes up to a standing position, “interrogating you.” She does five more squats, which I make sure to count out loud, so she knows I really am paying attention.
When she steps back and racks the bar for a brief rest in between sets, she wipes her face again, and says, “I care about you, you ass, and you’re clearly miserable, so out with it. It’ll make you feel better.”
“Will it?” It’s not like she can do anything to fix it.
She steps back into position for her second set of squats. “My grandmother used to say ‘trouble shared is trouble halved.’” Stella’s grandmother was Hollywood royalty in the fifties and known for bon mots like this.
What the hell. It’s not like I have anyone else to talk about this with. “I’m in love with my dead best friend’s widower. He’s my daughter’s stepfather, we had a fling during her wedding, but we’ve led completely separate lives ever since his wife died, and I don’t see anything about that changing.”
Succinct and delivered in a matter-of-fact way that doesn’t reveal how much the whole situation has been tearing me up inside. I don’t mention the one-night stand on the night of Leah’s funeral. Even saying this much out loud makes it real in a way it wasn't before. All those years of half-hoping, of convincing myself that someday…
“Why not?”
“Well, for one thing, he’s bi, but there’s no way he can publicly be in relationship with a man.”
And that’s the crux of it. There is no someday with Jason. There's just what we’ve had, which isn’t enough, but that’s all there can be.
Stella pauses at the bottom of a squat. Which is when I remember that she’s not exactly out, either. Everyone who really knows her knows that she’s a lesbian, which means that her directors know, most of her costars know, her hairstylist, makeup artist, and personal assistants know.
Plus me, obviously. But the press doesn’t know and neither do most of the studio executives on the movies she’s worked on.
Most of Hollywood thinks the woman she’s been with for decades is her chief personal assistant and few people know they married secretly a few years ago. A wedding I officiated, as it happens.
“Sorry,” I say awkwardly.
“What are you apologizing for?” She finishes her squats and racks the weighted bar.
“I didn’t mean to…I mean, I’m not…” I trail off just as awkwardly. See, this is why I shouldn’t have even started talking about Jason.
