Adulation (28 page)

Sunny.

I snapped up at attention.

Holy shit, did he...? Was that...? Did he just...?

The orchestra music drowned him out, and he was led offstage.

Josh’s mischievous, amused look returned. “Sunny!” he said, shaking his head in astonishment. “We’re gonna have to get you a publicist!”

Not even a minute afterward—the show hadn’t even cut to commercial yet—my landline rang. Ipicked up the receiver of the Mickey Mouse phone on the end table next to the couch.

“Sunny, I can’t believe it—Danny Masters just mentioned you by name at
 
the Oscars
 
!” said Theoamidst a room full of excited chatter.

Georgie took the phone from her next, although I wouldn’t be surprised if Theo had to goad him

into taking it. “Congratulations, honey,” he said sarcastically. “The
 
E!
 
Channel is gonna be knocking at your door any minute now.”

The roller coaster ride had begun, without my permission, yet again. A flood of text messages and Facebook notifications barraged me. I wished I could deny it, but how many Sunnys could Danny Masters (or anyone else, for that matter) encounter in one lifetime? Did such coincidences really exist? Dr. Raj Patel, the self-help mega best-seller, had recently done a PBS special entirely on the  nature of coincidence and synchronicity. I found myself wondering what he would make of this.

Josh teased me like a group of elementary school kids on a playground: “
Sunny has a boyfriend, Sunny has a boyfriend
,” he sang. “And it’s not
 
me
 
!” he laughed.

“Don’t you know what this means?” Theo asked the next day during lunch. She didn’t wait for my reply. “It means he still thinks of you, Sunny! Danny Masters
 
likes
 
you! You have to get in touch with him. It can’t be that hard. Call the studio, call a newspaper, hire a PI, something.”

I looked at her incredulously. “I am not going to stalk Danny Masters. And don’t you think every Sunny is calling him right now, not to mention a bunch of Thelmas, Agneses, Joans, and Carolines—and probably a few Toms, Dicks, and Harrys, come to think of it—who’ve suddenly changed their names to Sunny? And how do we even know
 
sunny
 
was a name? Maybe he was saying something like, ‘It’s sunny skies from now on.’”

Theo wore an expression that implied I was stupid. I probably would’ve given me that same look.

“Seriously, I have no idea what you’re afraid of,” she said. “What more do you need, a hit on the head?” I didn’t answer her. “And when are you going to patch things up with Georgie? I’m sick of being your go-between.”

“I’m really sorry about that, Theo. That was never my intention.”

“I never told you this, but there was a time when I was jealous of you two. You’ve always had a closeness with Georgie that you never had with me.”

I reached out to take her hand. “That’s not true.”

She opened her hand and welcomed mine. “I mean, I’m OK with it now. It’s different, that’s all. Iwas afraid you were going to use me to take his place, and maybe a little part of me would’ve liked that. But now I see how miserable you both are, and it makes me miserable too. I miss the three of us.”

We both had tears in our eyes. Beautiful, smart, funny, unafraid-of-life Theo. How could she thinkfor even one second that I didn’t love her as much as I did Georgie? And how could I make her happyagain?

“I do too,” I said softly. “Like crazy.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Danny Masters

Oscar Night, 2011

T
HE NIGHT HAD
 
been surreal.

Previous Oscar winners had told Danny it would be that way. His head would be in a fog theentire night, his stomach an endless pit of anxiety. If he won, some force other than his legs wouldtransport him to the stage, make his lips move, wrap his hands around the golden idol as if it were an Atari joystick from the early eighties. He’d think the oddest things at the most inopportune moments,they’d said, like how phallic the statue was, or thank God he didn’t have to be wearing a gown and six-inch heels, or holy shit, what was his mother’s name.

Of course if he lost, he’d been warned to look gracious and accepting, for the camera would becapturing the expressions of the losers, and more often than not, viewers watched
 
those
 
faces rather thanthe winner’s. They wanted to see some sign of resentment, outrage, injustice. So Danny had practiced hisloser look in the mirror just as much as he’d practiced his acceptance speech.

The moment fellow screenwriter and last year’s winner, January Miller, enunciated his name, thewords leaping  from her lips, he heard a collective yawp, followed by a whoosh, as if the world had goneinto slow motion and the oxygen was sucked out of the room. Were it not for Charlene cupping his faceand planting a juicy kiss on his mouth, he might have forgotten she was there. He didn’t remember walkingto the stage or stopping along the way to hug Paul Wolf and Sharon Blake and anyone else who happenedto be in his path. He didn’t remember saying the words of his acceptance speech, although he hoped he’dsaid them all and not forgotten anyone. (He did remember, halfway through, wondering if any of Charlene’s lipstick was left on his mouth, and he wiped it profusely at one point.)

And he had not remembered when and why he decided to hold up the statue and say,
 
Sunny, I hopeall is forgiven.

He’d not considered the ramifications of saying such a thing. He’d not thought about the camerathat would simultaneously be on Charlene, watching
 
her
 
every reaction—first the tears (and he was prettysure she’d been practicing that just as much as he’d been practicing his speech), then a flash of confusion,uncertainty in her eyes, all in an instant, before remembering where she was and who was watching her. He’d not considered that the press’s very first question would be, “Who is Sunny, and what needs to beforgiven?” He’d had no desire to put Sunny into the spotlight, to explain to the world before he did to Charlene or Ella or Frannie or anyone else who she was. Heck,
 
he
 
didn’t know who she was or why,almost five months later, he still cared. Her last words,
 
I’m not who you think I am
, still rang in his earslike tinnitus.

In a stroke of good fortune, the mic had cut out and the music signaled he was done. Thus no oneheard anything beyond “Sunny,” and no one asked for an explanation when he was off stage and in thepressroom, camera flashes rapid-firing, creating strobe-light optical illusions before his eyes. He haddodged a bullet.

The parties following the ceremony also passed in a haze—more flashbulbs and camera phones,more on-the-spot interviews by waif-like girls with long hair and fake tans wearing close-cut gowns andupdos with enough hair spray to catch fire if they stood too close to a flame, and lots of handshakes, patson the back, toasts, and applause. He drank everything nonalcoholic that he could find, surprised that whathe missed more than the taste of the champagne was holding the flute itself. In fact, he was surprised thathe was barely craving a drink at all and hypothesized that winning an Academy Award, and all theadulation that came with it, was a better intoxicant. And he knew he would tell no one how good it all felt,how the night totally belonged to him. He would deny the soft, seemingly distant panging (although hecould feel it in the back of his throat) that the one person he wanted to tell was Sunny. For the duration ofthe party, people wanted to be his friend, wish him well, get in on his next project.
 
That
 
was what hedrank all night.

He and Charlene came back to Danny’s house just before the sun came up, and she kicked off her platformstiletto  shoes, followed by the dress (both made by the some Italian designer), which she had topractically peel off like a Fruit Roll-Up. Danny had undone his tie hours ago, and he had stepped out ofhis shoes the moment they entered the house. She pulled countless bobby pins out of her hair, her updosprayed so tightly it remained in place even as she tried to shake it out, and he guessed more had fallenout as she took a shower and scrubbed off her makeup. Meanwhile Danny sat outside on his deck andwatched the sunrise, smoked a cigarette, and then closed his eyes. He was jarred awake when Charlene,dressed in sweats, flip-flops, and a towel wrapped around her head like a turban, kicked his lounge chairand said, “Now you tell me who Sunny is, and so help you God if you’ve been doing her all this time.”

Danny paused for a beat to absorb the shock. “You heard that?” he asked, and when she didn’tmove a muscle he blurted, “It’s not what you think,” thinking,
 
My God, how clichéd
, as he said the words. Not to mention stupid. Even Charlene seemed disappointed.

“Really?” she said, her tone laced with sarcasm. He couldn’t tell if it referred to his word choiceor to the excuse. Perhaps both. She sat beside him and snuffed out his cigarette for him, waiting for anexplanation.

“She’s the woman who called me a jackass at the thing back in October,” he confessed. The sunhad fully risen and shone brightly, forcing him to squint as he spoke.

“And what was so important that you had to tell her in front of the whole goddamned world? Infront of
me
?”

His mind raced for an answer. “I honestly don’t know; it was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I justwanted to say something nice, I guess.”

“Oh, please.”

“Char, what do you want from me? I’ve had no contact with her since it happened. Besides, youseem to be the only person who even heard it,” he said, although he knew fans were probably transcribingthe speech as he had spoken the words.

“What I don’t understand is why you mentioned her at all. What do you care about what oneungrateful fan said five months ago?”

“Because I thought she might like to be acknowledged in a positive way this time.” Dannyconsidered lighting another cigarette, but changed his mind after his stomach growled. Meanwhile Charlene continued to glare at him.

“What, Char,” he said. “Just say it.”

“You’ve been different ever since that premiere. It’s like you’re constantly preoccupied.”

“Do you know how much pressure I’ve been under, especially with the new show? I’ve scrapped three different versions of one pilot script already, the latest version isn’t even finished, and the press is already comparing it to all my other stuff without having read a word of it. They’re judging it based on rumor. Now I’m an Oscar winner. Which, by the way, I’d like to enjoy for one damn minute, if you don’t mind. Can we do that, please? I mean, look at it.”