Page 7 of Second Act
He fell asleep at the pool every night with a bottle next to him and woke up with it empty every morning. He knew he was feeling sorry for himself and couldn’t help it. He felt as if his life as he knew it had ended. He thought of going to a headhunter, but that would be embarrassing too. He didn’t need a job for a paycheck. FAQTS had paid him handsomely, with an additional bonus from AMCO, to get rid of him. He had three years of a huge salary coming to him in a lump sum within thirty days of his being fired. And his investment portfolio was healthy. He didn’t need a job, but he needed something to occupy him.
It made him feel sick when he saw his art being returned, and allthe posters of his parents. It made it all seem so final. The contents of his desk arrived in four boxes, which Frances unpacked and put away. He found places for some of the art and the posters of his parents and hung them himself, to keep busy.
Two weeks to the day after he’d been fired, he still couldn’t believe the word applied to him and was part of his life now. He woke up at the pool again with another brutal hangover, and walked into his study, where Frances was sorting through bank statements, bills, and correspondence, which she normally handled for him. He looked at her in desperation. He glanced at another list of messages for calls he wouldn’t answer, and emails he didn’t want to read, and said to her in a low growl, “Get me out of here.” For a minute, she thought it was good news.
“You mean the house? Do you want your car brought around?” One of the men he employed at the house could drive for him, or he could drive himself. He hadn’t left the house in Bel-Air in two weeks. The weather had gotten warm. It was April. She didn’t know where he wanted to go, but it didn’t matter. “Do you want the Range Rover?”
“No, I mean away from here. Venezuela, Guatemala, Peru, Tahiti, Samoa, the Galápagos, somewhere where no one knows me and doesn’t give a damn if I’m unemployed.” The word tasted like ashes.
“Are you serious?” She looked startled and didn’t know if he meant it. He wasn’t usually an exotic traveler. He went to places like Cannes, Paris, London, Berlin, for film festivals or premieres of Global’s movies. Everything he did was work-related, or used to be.
“No, not those places. But I want to go somewhere away from here. Maybe for a few months until I feel like myself again and cango to the Polo Lounge for lunch without wanting to hide under the table.”
“People will forget what happened eventually,” she said, to encourage him, but they both knew it wasn’t true. They would tell the story of his getting fired forever, and whatever sidebar they could add to it, which was why he was staying out of sight, so there were none. He didn’t want photos of him going around town, doing mundane things, or buying lunch. He had nothing else to do now. He had no interests or hobbies, just his job. And he didn’t have that anymore. Work was fun to him. Time off never had been.
“Maybe someplace civilized,” he said thoughtfully, “out in the country somewhere. France is too romantic and will depress me, and I don’t want to sit in some drafty chateau. It’s too late in the season to ski in Switzerland. I’ll get fat on pasta in Italy. And I don’t speak the language in Germany, France, Italy, or Spain. Maybe England.” He looked hopeful as he said it.
“Where in England?”
“I don’t care, just so it’s some small town in the country where no one will know me. Or a beach town, maybe something on the sea. Even Ireland, but it rains a lot there. Just get me out of LA.”
“I’ll see what I can find,” Frances said, and went to get her laptop.
It didn’t make it any easier that Alana hadn’t called him since the day he got fired and wasn’t likely to call again. He didn’t call her either. He didn’t want to. He had seen a picture in the papers of her at a fancy gallery opening with a well-known director. Alana always protected her career and her future. Andy was no longer of use to her, and no longer had access to the company plane. She was after another big fish now. Andy knew her, and knew the game. He knewhe’d never hear from her again. She was as merciless as AMCO. He didn’t really miss her, but he felt the rejection acutely. She was another perk of his job that had vanished overnight. It was almost funny, but not quite. He knew that one day he might laugh at all of it, but not yet. He felt each loss like a body blow, and he knew he was on the ropes.
He wondered what his father would have told him to do. John Westfield had never lived with rejection, nor been fired. He had been a star to the end of his days. The public never tired of him—even now, years after his death, people still watched his movies. Andy loved them too, and his mother’s. He had been proud of his parents, and they wouldn’t have been proud of him now. He felt like a failure, even though it wasn’t his fault he had been fired. He had just been a casualty of the corporate wars. He was collateral damage of a fast move in a billion-dollar deal. They had sacrificed him to close it and keep the buyer happy. It made him feel even more insignificant.
He felt out of control now, with no sense of direction, like a ship without a rudder or a car with no steering wheel and no brakes. He had lost control of his life, and knew he had to find it again. He couldn’t stay like this forever. It was terrifying.
—
Frances worked on it for two whole days before getting back to Andy. She looked on the internet for houses to rent, furnished and fully staffed, available for a month or two, as she guessed that that was what he needed before coming back to LA to pick up the threads of his life again. After she saw a house she liked on the internet, shecalled the realtor offering it. Most of the houses evaporated into thin air or were unsuitable. Very few seemed decent once she started asking questions about how close the nearest village was, or if the house had central heating. It would still be cold in England in April, and many of the photographs looked depressing. Or their idea of “fully staffed” was a cleaning woman who came once a week, or Andy would have to bring his own cooking pots and linens.
Frances came back to him on the third day of her research for him and was sorry she didn’t have more to offer. She had come across a fantastic villa in the South of France, but it turned out there had been a major robbery there with owners and staff tied up and robbed, and the realtor suggested armed guards for protection, so she ruled that out, and a charming villa in Siena, which had recently had a fire and was under repair. So she stuck with England. The crop of available houses wasn’t plentiful there either. She had found a farm in Norfolk which sounded too rustic to her, and Andy wasn’t famous for wanting to rough it. He was spoiled by the comforts of his own home and the kind of hotels he went to, like the Hôtel du Cap, in Cap d’Antibes, but the Cannes Film Festival was coming up in a month, and the hotel would be full of people he knew who would be well aware of his current circumstances. So that was definitely out.
There was a cottage in the Cotswolds which looked adorable, but it was tiny, with only one bedroom and no staff, which she knew wouldn’t suit him. She found a castle in the north of England, in severe disrepair, with no central heating, that had recently been used to make a horror film. And there was a house in East Sussex, in a town called Winchelsea Beach, which seemed like the bestpossibility, just outside a tiny, antiquated beach town, built on the thirteenth-century remains of a medieval town, which had long since been forgotten. The beach town had a population of nine hundred and the inland part of it had fewer than six hundred inhabitants. Oddly, someone had remodeled one of the old houses near the beach and turned it into a very large, luxurious hideaway. It seemed totally out of place. The house was bigger than Andy needed and was surprisingly fancy given the location. The rooms were huge and handsomely decorated, and there were very elegant marble bathrooms and a high-tech, modern kitchen. The realtor said it was fully furnished, and there were a housekeeper and a maid. They didn’t stay in the evenings and didn’t live there, but the housekeeper might be willing to cook a meal occasionally. The house had been seized by a bank in foreclosure, and the bank wanted to sell it. But they were willing to rent it for six months, to defray the costs of running it, and Andy would have to agree to vacate the house at the end of the six-month period if they sold it. Frances couldn’t imagine his wanting to stay away for that long, and thought the rental was too long, but she told him about it anyway. The house was on the coast, there was a beach nearby, and it was less than three hours from London by car if he wanted to go to the city when he felt better. And there was a train, which took less than two hours. There was a small harbor with fishing boats and small sailboats. And the beach was a mile and a half long. And when she inquired, the realtor said there was a doctor, a dentist, a hairdresser, two grocery stores, two pubs, a fish market, an inn, a post office, and a church in the area. There were some larger coastal towns nearby, but Winchelsea Beach was tiny. The swimming and wind surfing were supposedly excellent.
The house itself seemed incongruous. Everything in it looked expensive and luxurious, and a little showy, which made no sense in an old-fashioned beach town. Whoever had built it obviously couldn’t afford it, since the bank had foreclosed. There were two cars in the garage that were in working order, an old Land Rover and a station wagon, that were part of the sale, along with all the furniture. From the photographs, it looked like the owners still lived there, and hadn’t been able to take anything with them. Even the paintings on the walls were being sold, according to the realtor representing the bank. The rental price was higher than most of the other rentals, but still way below anything in LA or in the States, or in London.
“What don’t you like about that one?” Andy asked her.
“The town is tiny and the house is too big for you. It’s got five bedrooms, and servants’ quarters on the top floor. They’re being used for storage now, because the two women who work there don’t live in. Oh, and there’s a groundskeeper. They said the garden is a little overgrown, they’re leaving it alone for new owners. I just think it sounds big for you. You won’t feel lost in a house that size?”
Andy smiled at her in answer. “I don’t feel lost here, and it’s a lot bigger than that place. It’s actually kind of stylish-looking. I like it, and the art isn’t bad. It does seem weird in that location, though. The owners must have overspent on it so they lost it.” She told him the price of the rent, which seemed low to him. “I like that it’s clean and modern, and not some crumbling old house with ‘charm,’ no heating, and terrible bathrooms. The bathrooms are nicer than mine here. They must have spent a fortune on them. I don’t know, Frances. It looks okay to me. Six months is too long, but who knows,maybe I’ll like it. I have nothing to do here. Maybe Wendy and the kids will want to come over when I feel better, or I can give it to them for a month or two, if I come back to LA early. It’s the only decent house you showed me. When is it available?”
“Now. It’s unoccupied. It’s been vacant for three years. The bank hasn’t been able to sell it. No one in the area wants a fancy house like that, and the realtor says the bank is asking too much, but they want to recoup what they lost on it, so now they’re renting.”
Andy looked at the pictures on her laptop again, and sighed. “Let’s do it. I’ll go crazy if I stay here, locked up in the house, dodging phone calls. I feel like I’m in jail, or under house arrest. It might be nice to have a beach nearby. Even if it’s too cold to swim, I can walk on the beach. I don’t suppose you want to come to England for six months to help me there?” he asked hopefully, and Frances looked instantly regretful.
“I’d love it, but my mom hasn’t been well. She’s seventy-five and she has MS and she falls down a lot. I moved her out from New York last year since she’s alone now. I don’t live with her, she has her own apartment, but I’ll probably have to move her in with me soon, and I can’t be that far away if anything happens. I check on her every day after work.” He nodded. She was a good person and it made sense.
“I’ll have to manage on my own. I want to cut way down on my correspondence. I just want to quietly disappear for a few months, till I figure out what to do with the rest of my life, or what I want to be when I grow up.” He smiled at her. He was the most grown-up person, and the kindest, she’d ever known, and she was sad to see him leave now. “What are you going to do when I leave?” he asked her.
“I guess I have to look for a job. I’m going to be living on my vacation money starting next week,” since they had only given her two weeks’ severance, which seemed obscene to him, after fifteen years working for the company.
“I’m going to give you six months of the salary I’m paying you now, when I go.” It was higher than the salary she’d been getting at Global as his assistant. “Don’t wait for me to come back. I don’t want you to miss opportunities if you find a good job. But this way you’ll have enough money to wait until you find the right one. Don’t sell yourself short. You’re a marvel, and you deserve an employer who appreciates you. I’ll give you a reference too. If you hate the job you find, you can always work for me when I come back. But I have no idea what I’m going to do, or when I’ll come back to LA. Maybe I’ll float around for a year. I just don’t know. I feel as though I got torn up by the roots two weeks ago, and I’m blowing in the wind.
“I don’t know what kind of job I’ll take when I come back. Maybe I’ll do something completely crazy and work for a nonprofit foundation. I have no ideas at all so far, and I’m not so sure that at my age I’ll find another big job in the film industry. And none of the studio heads are even close to stepping down. They’re all doing a good job so they’re not going to get fired. I don’t see a future for me back in pictures, or any future at all for now.”
