Yearn: Tales of Lust and Longing

“No, Max this—this is her world,” he countered with a vehemence that surprised both of them.

• • •

That night Toby made love to Jennifer with a pounding fury, but just before he was about to climax, the image of the man’s face slipped across Jennifer’s flushed face, the hot tangle of moving limbs, the core of their rhythm, and as hard as he tried Toby couldn’t come. He fell back against the mattress, his back slippery with sweat.

“What’s wrong?” In the dark Jennifer’s voice was reedy with anxiety.

“You tell me.”

“Toby, I’m not having an affair.”

Rolling away from her, he didn’t answer.

“What can I do to prove it?” she asked.

“Jenny, he’s everywhere. He’s in your hair, in this house, outside in the fucking studio, in your body.”

“No he’s not; I made him up!” She was cracking now, a great chasm tearing open between them, and he wanted to rescue her but somehow couldn’t.

“It’s just a question of time,” he muttered darkly.

“What do you want from me?” she screamed, but he had pulled the blankets over his head, huddling.

She went to sleep on the couch downstairs. As she wormed her way down into the lumpy cushions, an old quilt pulled over her like a tent, she wondered how he could be so jealous and so doubting when both of them knew that she was the more faithful.

She tried to distract herself from her weeping by thinking about the sculptures sitting in her studio like silent captive performers waiting to be led to the theater. She had made so many parts, the shape of her muse now resonated in her hands like the memory of a blind person. The familiarity was so real it was as if she knew him already. “Is this infidelity?” she wondered, just as the shape of his penis, or at least her rendering of it, fluttered down the back of her head and tingled in her fingers and groin. Could you want someone you’d never met so much? Was this how some women felt about celebrities?

She tossed and turned, trying to fold her long legs into the crook of the couch. Finally she pulled a long pillow from another chair and wrapped herself around it as if it were a man—her man, her creation—and slept without dreaming.

• • •

The next day, Toby, his body clock still in a different time zone, got up early and, after slipping past the sleeping Jennifer, left the house to drive into the city. He wound his way around Studley Park at that time of morning when there is no one around except joggers and cyclists, but already the day had begun to heat up and a dryness lay over the morning air. He felt all jittery, as if something momentous lay just ahead but he couldn’t quite see it. It was disorienting, this feeling of a premonition, and Toby, who liked to be in control of the events in his life, felt threatened.

On Lygon Street he had a cappuccino and a pastry at his favorite Italian café, then walked around to the casting agency he’d always used for his films. Casey, a woman in her midfifties who’d worked with Toby for over fifteen years, was already in her office. A broad woman with a healthy disregard for the niceties of beauty, she was famous for her maternal earthiness and zero tolerance for the egotism of her more famous clientele.

Casey was leaning back in her chair, headset wrapped around her face as she talked furiously to someone in London. She was framed by the photographs of actors and actresses that covered her back wall, shiny in youth and hope. Smiling at Toby but not bothering to pause the rapid fire of her conversation, she indicated that he should sit. He threw himself down in a leather chair opposite her and, staring over her head, noticed a very early head shot of an impossibly young Jerome Thomas. For a minute Toby slipped back into memories of his own first film, the one that had launched the star’s career. Casey finished her conversation and pulled off the headset.

“Sorry, trouble with a client in London. So Jesus, Toby, I thought you’d still be in Rome, or at best in an editing suite.”

“I will be in a couple of days, but I had a few days off and Jenny’s got a show opening tomorrow.”

“That’s right, I think I have an invite somewhere. . . . How is the lovely Jenny?”

“She’s okay. Listen, I have a question for you.” He pulled out the magazine image, unfolded it, then laid it flat on the desk. “Do you know who this is?”

She turned the photocopy around so that she could see it more clearly.

“I mean, I figure you know everyone, right? Actors, models, wannabes . . . Southern and Northern Hemisphere.” His voice tightening, he wondered whether he really did want to know.

“You know me, babe, I’m a total face slut. If he’s anyone I’d know him.” She studied the young man thoughtfully. “You thinking of casting him? He’s definitely got presence, a little Keanu Reeves meets Hugh Jackman—but can he act?”

“Just tell me who the fuck he is, Casey,” he snapped.

Casey glanced up, surprised, then shrugged and pulled out a book filled with images of smiling actors—a casting reference book of A-list actors and models. She turned the pages, scanning the photos for a match. Finally she shut the book.

“Well, he’s not a local actor or a model; that much I can tell you. And I don’t recognize him from ICM America. Toby, what’s this all about?”

“Nothing. Forget I asked.” He snatched back the photocopy.