‘It’s not just the Academy Awards themselves,’ she gushed excitedly. ‘There’ll be the nominees’ dinner, the Independent Spirits a few weeks before, plus we’re pretty certain to have a premiere now for the US release at least, and I guess something in London too. Don’t you think?’
‘Sure.’ Vio feigned enthusiasm. ‘We’re all gonna be busy promoting now, but you especially.’
‘
Us
especially,’ Sabrina corrected him. ‘No one wants to see me on my own, babe. The world wants the love story.’
Oh Christ
, thought Vio helplessly.
She’s right. I’ll be sucked in deeper than ever now.
‘I thought I’d go short for the Independent Spirits and the US premiere. Probably Marchesa, although Jason Wu’s doing some awesome stuff for spring …’
‘Uh-huh.’ Vio nodded vaguely.
‘You pretty much have to go long for the Oscars. But I don’t want anything too frilly or romantic.’ She reached across the table and took his hand. ‘I’m saving the big princess dress for our wedding.’
Viorel took back his hand and ran it through his hair.
‘Oh God, Sabrina,’ he said desperately. ‘There isn’t going to be a wedding.’
Sabrina hesitated for a moment. Then she laughed and said, ‘Well, no, not this year obviously. With all this Best Actress circus going on, we won’t have time to plan for—’
‘Not any year. Not ever,’ said Viorel. He didn’t want to look at Sabrina, but he had to. He knew each word hit her like a hammer blow, but he had to keep going. ‘I’m not in love with you. I’m sorry. I wish I were but I …’
‘Is there someone else?’ Sabrina’s voice was quiet, thin and reedy like a young child’s. It didn’t sound as if it had come from her, and indeed she wasn’t aware of having thought of the question before her subconscious had blurted it out.
‘No,’ said Viorel truthfully.
‘Then maybe … maybe there’s a chance?’ Sabrina quavered. Viorel winced. The heartbreak in her face, the desperation in her words … it was unbearable.
‘There isn’t,’ he said. He felt like a murderer.
‘But, how can you know that?’ she pleaded. Tears were streaming freely down her face in the darkness. Quiet tears, not the hysterical, angry tears that would have been so much easier. She wasn’t making a scene. All the pain on her face was raw and genuine. Viorel felt sick. ‘You loved me before.’
‘I didn’t,’ murmured Vio, soundly barely less anguished than she did. ‘I mean, I do love you, Sab. But not in the way you mean. More like a … a sister.’
For the first time, Sabrina sounded angry, although the anger was all but lost beneath the pain. ‘A sister? Jesus, Vio, you didn’t seem too
brotherly
this afternoon. When you were in my bed, begging me to come for you. Remember that?’
‘I know.’ He looked down at his lap, more ashamed than he could ever remember feeling in his life. ‘I know. Sexually things have always been so good between us. That’s part of the problem.’
Sabrina laughed, but it was a laugh without a shred of joy.
‘It’s not that I don’t want you,’ said Viorel.
‘Just that you don’t want to marry me.’
He nodded miserably. ‘I’m so sorry, angel. But I wouldn’t be able to make you happy.’
‘You would!’ she insisted, the tears flowing faster than ever.
‘No. I wouldn’t. And I can’t stand up in front of millions of people and keep living this lie. I’m sorry.’
‘So you keep saying,’ said Sabrina. Burying her head in her napkin, she sat still for a few moments, breathing deeply, trying to compose her emotions. Finally, she looked up, her tears dry, her voice even. ‘I appreciate you telling me the truth,’ she said calmly. ‘It can’t have been easy for you.’
‘Oh God, please don’t be kind to me,’ said Viorel. ‘I’m a total arsehole. You deserve so much better.’
Sabrina stood up. Gently, she reached over and stroked his cheek. ‘You’re lovely,’ she said softly. ‘But I think I need to be on my own right now. I’ll stay at a hotel tonight.’
‘No,’ Vio insisted. ‘Please.
I’ll
stay at a hotel. For a few weeks, or as long as you need. The apartment’s yours, forever if you want it.’
Sabrina hesitated for a moment. ‘OK,’ she said eventually. ‘Thanks.’ And without another word, she turned and walked away.
Viorel didn’t know how long he sat at the table alone, staring at her empty chair. He’d expected to feel relief, now that the deed was done. Instead he felt horribly depressed, as if all the hope had been sucked out of him. By the time he was aware that a waiter was talking to him, the bar was all but empty.
‘Is there anything else I can get for you, Mr Hudson?’
Vio shook his head. ‘Just the check.’
There was something missing in his life, he decided. Or perhaps it was missing in
him
. Some crucial piece of the puzzle that had been misplaced, and without which he could not be truly happy.
Poor Sabrina
, he thought, rubbing his eyes tiredly.
I hope she’s OK.
Dorian hesitated at the stop light on Wilshire and Ocean.
Should I turn back? Do it tomorrow? Is ten thirty too late to drop by unannounced?
He was on his way to Viorel’s apartment – Viorel and Sabrina’s apartment – to congratulate Sabrina in person. It was the right thing to do. The
normal
thing to do. Somehow he had to try to get his life back to some form of normality, to accept things as they were. Sabrina and Vio were together. He was their director. They were all of them standing on the cusp of a career-defining moment. This was a time for graciousness, for professionalism, for maturity. Both Sabrina and Hudson were little more than kids. Dorian was the old Hollywood hand. They would look to him for guidance and leadership in the media frenzy that an Oscar nod always generated.
The light turned green. Above Dorian’s head, the moonless California sky was lit not by stars but by the light pouring up from Santa Monica’s commercial district, Third Street Promenade, and the gaudy, flashing neon glow of the pier. He thought about Transylvania, with its nights so clear and stars so diamond bright you almost felt you could reach up and touch them with your fingertips. How wildly, preposterously different it was to Los Angeles. And yet how he loved both places with such passion. Both were part of his life, his blood, his history. He hadn’t yet gotten around to the paperwork, officially transferring the Schloss back to the Romanian government. Maybe now, with this Oscar news, he wouldn’t have to? Maybe he could afford the place after all.
Pulling over on the Venice end of Main Street, he switched off the engine of his rented Prius and sat alone in the driver’s seat, debating with himself.
Do I not want to go in because it’s so late? Or because I can’t face seeing them together, all loved-up and excited?
Once he’d got back to LA and taken a room at the Beverly Wilshire, he’d shaved, showered and eaten in an attempt to make himself look less like a hollow-eyed madman. It had worked, on the outside. But inside he still felt a despair that threatened to transmute itself into embarrassing tears at any moment. He’d put off the inevitable for as long as he could, taking business calls in his room, walking out into Beverly Hills to pick up a newspaper and a new packet of razors and a bottle of very essential acai berry vitamin water –
when in LA, right?
But at last he’d realized that if he didn’t face Sabrina today, he would have to do it tomorrow, or the next day. And that one more night with that axe hanging over his head was more than even he could bear.
Just do it, you big pussy. Ring the buzzer, go on up, have a glass of champagne with them and leave.
Somehow the 200-yard walk from Main to Navy managed to take him fifteen minutes. But eventually, Dorian was standing at the apartment gate.
It’s now or never.
He was about to ring the buzzer when he noticed that the gate was actually ajar. Stepping inside, he locked it behind him and took the stairs up to Viorel’s apartment. That, too, had its front door open, although inside it was ominously silent and dark. Dorian felt his pulse quicken.
Jesus. There’s been a break-in.
Straightforward burglaries were not uncommon in this part of the West Side. But with a celebrity home, you always had to wonder whether some unscrupulous tabloid journalist wasn’t involved, or a would-be blackmailer, hoping to find some compromising material, drugs or a sex tape or …
please, not a sex tape
, thought Dorian in agony.
‘Hello?’ he called nervously into the blackness. ‘Is anybody in there?’
Silence.
He fumbled for his cellphone, hoping to use its screen as a makeshift flashlight.
Perhaps I should call the cops?
he thought,
just to be on the safe side.
But he was already stepping into the apartment, shining the Nokia’s dim light on the walls, hunting for a switch. Eventually, he found it and turned the lights on. The entire open-plan living room lit up like a movie set, so brightly that for a minute Dorian half closed his eyes against the glare. Nothing appeared to have been touched. The place looked immaculate, like a feature for
Dream Homes
magazine. Hudson always had fancied himself as design guru
manqué
.
‘Viorel?’ Dorian called again, growing less jumpy now that he could see. ‘Are you in here? It’s me, Dorian.’ He walked down the hall towards the bedroom. ‘The gate was wide open. I almost …’
He stopped mid-sentence. Sprawled naked in the bedroom doorway lay Sabrina. Looking past her into the bedroom, Dorian saw a slew of empty pill bottles littering the bed and floor and nightstand.
No.
‘Sabrina!’ He turned her over and slapped her face, shaking her limp body like a rag doll. No response. Desperate, he pressed his face to her mouth, trying to feel if she was breathing. She wasn’t. Panicked, he froze for a few seconds, trying to remember anything about CPR and failing utterly. Finally, he remembered the cellphone in his hand and dialled 911.
‘Emergency. Yeah, I’m with a friend, she’s overdosed. 11991 Navy Boulevard Venice. She … she’s not breathing.’ He could hear his own voice breaking. ‘I think she might be dead.’
St John’s Hospital on Santa Monica and Twentieth was comprised of two gleaming-white towers connected by a lower glass building, and everything about it spoke of modernity, efficiency and wealth. Everything except the Emergency Room, a stinking, windowless basement filled with homeless drunks, incontinent junkies, screaming, bleeding children and their distraught parents and three of the most obese, joyless and unhelpful registrars it had ever been Dorian’s misfortune to encounter.
‘Overdose?’ asked the charge nurse, in the same bored monotone with which a McDonald’s waitress might have asked him if he wanted fries.
‘Yes,’ he panted frantically. ‘Her notes are right here. She’s stopped breathing again. The paramedics have been trying to revive her in the—’
‘Uh-huh. Wait here please.’
‘“Wait here”? I don’t think you’re hearing me. She is
not breathing!
’
‘I hear you, sir,’ the nurse sighed heavily. ‘Your friend is the third overdose we’ve had in here in the last two hours. We’ll get her intubated just as soon as we can.’
‘It’s Sabrina Leon,’ one of the paramedics blurted breathlessly.
The nurse looked more closely at the wan, masked face on the gurney. ‘It is?’
‘Uh-huh. The one and only.’
‘Well why didn’t you say so?’ Instantly, the fat woman’s face changed from hostile to pleasant. ‘Follow me, please. Room six, triage. Doctor Emanuelle’ll be right with you.’
And from the moment Sabrina’s name was mentioned, Dr Emanuelle
was
right with them, as were a veritable legion of white-coated voyeurs, all of them swooping down on the triage suite like a flock of fame-hungry doves.
Only in LA
, thought Dorian bitterly, although for once he was grateful for the special celebrity treatment, stepping back to let them do their work, his own identity apparently unnoticed as they descended on Sabrina’s lifeless form with tubes and needles and an astonishing array of monitors, paddles and wires.
‘What’s happening?’ He tapped one of the nurses on the shoulder, no longer able to see Sabrina at all through the throng. ‘What are they doing to her? Is she breathing again?’
‘Are you family?’ asked the nurse.
‘No. I’m a friend. I’m the one who found her.’
‘Then I’m sorry, sir, but I’m gonna have to ask you to wait outside. We can only share information with immediate family or partners, and even they aren’t really supposed to be in here.’
Unlike the harridan on reception, this nurse was kind and polite in her tone. But she was also firm. Dorian pushed through the double exit doors and stood in the corridor stunned, like a man who’d just been bombed and dug his way out of the rubble into the sunlight. The hallway had been full twenty minutes ago, but now it was empty, save for one blue-scrubbed orderly folding gowns on a trolley. The quiet added to the eerie sense of unreality, but it was soon broken by a familiar voice.
‘Dorian?’
At first glance, Viorel looked his usual suave, immaculate self, the black wool of his jacket and lapis blue of his shirt reflecting perfectly his oil-black hair and azure eyes. But as he came closer, Dorian made out the circles of stress under his eyes, and the haunted sunkenness of his cheeks.
He looks almost as miserable as I do.
‘Where is she?’ Vio ran his hand through his hair frantically. ‘I drove here like a fucking maniac. Someone called me twenty minutes ago. I guess I’m listed as her next of kin or something. Is she OK?’
‘She’s alive,’ said Dorian bleakly. ‘But she isn’t breathing. At least she wasn’t a few minutes ago. They’ve got a hundred doctors in with her now.’
‘Oh God.’ It came out as more groan than words. Leaning back against the wall, Vio literally slumped to the floor, like a paraplegic whose wheelchair had suddenly been whipped out from under him. ‘It’s all my fault.’