FLIGHT
It was one of those long-haul flights, the overnight L.A.–London route, when the plane chases the sun north across the globe in a streak of perpetual dawn. Cocooned in the pastel-colored luxury of the first-class cabin sat one entrepreneur, a minor Saudi prince and his wife, two American executives being flown by their company for a day with investors in London, a Chinese businesswoman, and one film star: male, Australian, and instantly recognizable.
Jerome Thomas, famous for his raven locks and piercing blue-gray eyes as well as huge donations to the starving orphans of Ecuador (all tax deductible, but that doesn’t make it any less commendable), was London based and on first-name terms with British Airways special services. Dressed in black jeans (Versace), a white shirt (Tom Ford), and purple loafers (Paul Smith) in true antipodean style, he affected a friendly casualness that belied an obsessive appreciation of anything luxurious, exclusive, and elitist.
At thirty-nine, the film star was at that point when he could either fade into obscurity along with his looks or move out from the romantic hero roles that he’d built his early career on into more three-dimensional dramatic roles. Luckily for Jerome, his latest film, Loser, had been an international success and had landed him an Oscar. A psychological drama that had required serious acting and physical transformation, it was about a middle-aged American businessman who finds himself suddenly divorced, unemployed, and without custody of his children. Then one day, homeless and sleeping under a bridge, the hero discovers a wild beehive and eventually finds spiritual meaning, new love, and redemption by becoming an urban beekeeper. Much to both Jerome’s and his agent’s amazement, the film had become a runaway hit and the film star had safely made the transition from romantic hero to serious actor.
Jerome Thomas was still eerily beautiful to look at, a fact that he had struggled with all his life, a situation made even more poignant by the fact that the actor was also unusually intelligent, with a capacity for empathy that he sometimes found paralyzing. Celebrity for him had been a curiously painful process, a little like a slow-growing disease he’d only become aware of around the release of his fourth film. He had begun his career as an intense young actor, in the business not for fame but to lose the real and very awkward self-consciousness that can haunt the very beautiful. Jerome had been desperate to be taken seriously. At NIDA, the prestigious Australian drama school where he’d trained, Jerome was set on a stage career in London, preferably as a Shakespearean actor. Then, a couple of American producers had run auditions for a romantic comedy starring Meryl Streep, about a young male escort who falls in love with his much older female businesswoman client. Jerome hadn’t even intended to go to the audition, but ended up accompanying his roommate, who was almost speechless with nerves and needed serious moral support. As fate would have it, Toby Gladwell, the young Australian director attached to the movie, cast him on the spot. The film went on to make millions but Jerome Thomas was typecast. To his deep but secret vexation he’d wanted to be taken seriously, and somehow, in the passionate pursuit of that objective, he had ended up hugely successful in unserious but very commercial projects. It was a paradox that Jerome had now escaped.
And so it was with a sense of sublime achievement rarely experienced by the extremely ambitious that Jerome had settled down in his favorite seat in first class, 1K, in the very nose of the jet with his customary two portholes. Here he could, without stretching his neck, gaze down on the carpet of lights that was Los Angeles as the plane swung to the left and then backed momentarily toward the city before heading northeast toward Canada and beyond.
He’d been in L.A. for a week meeting with “his people” and several directors to decide on the next film project, the script of which was now tucked securely in the magazine pocket in front of him. He’d also caught up with a lover there, a young make-up artist he’d seduced on the set of his last movie, a twenty-two-year-old from Kansas whose endearing lack of irony laced with naive optimism had reminded him of himself when he’d first landed in L.A. fifteen years ago. But on this latest visit Jerome had found himself increasingly vexed by her awe of him, and, yet again, he’d ended up feeling as if the dialogue she thought she was having with him was nothing but transference on her behalf, a discourse with some idealized version of him she’d created from various roles he had played. Jerome’s true self was lost in celluloid, in that mirror of who his lover thought he was. It was a frighteningly familiar experience that always seemed to hijack his relationships, one that inevitably left him feeling disingenuous, guilty, and inadequate, as if he himself was somehow responsible for his lovers’ projections.
It was when he began to notice that his young girlfriend had started to spout lines he’d used in movies without even realizing it that he’d finished the affair, appalled. Since then an aphorism one of his drama tutors had always used—“Wear the truth like a skin”—had begun to run through his head like a pop tune he couldn’t get rid of. This sense of shifting identities was beginning to drive him crazy. Suddenly deeply aware that he’d actually started to lose his Australian accent, even to dress in the manner of some of his more famous roles, he’d become terrified he was losing his own “truth.”
In reaction he’d secretly started to address himself by his childhood pet name, Rom, and had taken to scribbling notes to himself as a desperate way of staying emotionally anchored. He’d made sure that no one else knew the pet name. This was an identity that belonged to him, not to any lover, not his agent, and certainly not his adoring fans. It was his personal totem, the anchor that held him together psychologically, but still he was finding it ha
rd to be himself with an intimate.
Jerome longed to argue, to fight, to have a disagreement with someone who didn’t know or care about who he was or how she imagined he would behave. He longed to be with someone who’d never seen a Jerome Thomas film, someone who didn’t know him. Maybe then he would be able to get a measure of his true power—power as a basic human being and not some nebulous idol that millions of people had projected their fantasies upon.
This secret longing of his had blossomed into an obsession. Jerome desperately needed to know whether he could still attract someone with who he really was behind the facade of fame. Early that day, driving back from his agent at William Morris’s office at Mid-Wilshire toward LAX, he made a pledge to himself. Before he was forty he would seduce someone who didn’t know who he was at all. It was a pledge he took seriously, especially as his birthday was the next day.
The actor’s gaze encircled the cabin. The entrepreneur, a jovial-looking man in his midfifties, had ostentatiously ignored Jerome, even when he’d almost bumped into him hanging up his leather jacket in the wardrobe tucked behind the pilot’s cabin. Such a reaction usually meant the other person had recognized the film star immediately and was shamming indifference—again, a scenario Jerome encountered over and over again, and one that at times had made him feel strangely isolated.
He glanced back over his shoulder at the Saudi prince and his wife, sitting in the center aisle, side by side. Now that the plane was safely in the sky, they had finished reciting the Koran. The prince was studying a portfolio and his wife was engrossed in flicking through the deluxe in-flight shopping magazine. Jerome, applying the character research skills he’d learned both at college and over the years, furtively examined the minutiae of the man—the way his shirt was immaculately laundered and ironed, the fastidiousness with which he kept pulling his cuffs over his wrists, indicating he was both controlling and nervous, characteristics, Jerome concluded, that were further underpinned by the bitten nails, chewed down to the skin, and a patch of eczema on the side of the prince’s face. Despite his vast wealth and influence, the prince obviously had hidden anxieties.
Jerome turned his attention to the prince’s wife. At least twenty years younger than her husband, she was possibly a third wife, and one with young children, children who were probably waiting for her in London, Jerome guessed, gleaning a faint air of excitement and expectancy around her. This was a woman who was returning to something pleasurable. A beautiful Middle Eastern woman in her early thirties, she smiled shyly across at Jerome from under her head scarf. Jerome smiled politely back at her, then pulled out his film script from the front pocket, rather disappointed that she too had recognized him. That left just one woman in the cabin, a woman he’d already noticed in the first-class lounge. He opened the script and pretended to be reading it as he peered over at her.
She was sitting directly opposite him across the aisle and was the only passenger in full view. A small, slim woman in her midforties whose beauty lay in both her fragility and the obvious skill she applied to her appearance. She was strikingly dressed in an elegant black Gucci suit—a short skirt and jacket. Her black hair was scraped back into an ornate bun; she wore a Patek Philippe watch, large diamond earrings that appeared to be real, and a ruffled mauve silk shirt under her jacket, which promised (a fact Jerome had become acutely aware of) rather full breasts on a narrow torso. Jerome, who was well traveled in Asia, guessed she was Chinese rather than Japanese and after studying her he decided she must be a member of the newly ascendant class of Chinese billionaires.
But what fascinated him most about this woman was that so far she appeared to have no idea whatsoever of his celebrity. He’d already checked out his theory in the first-class lounge by walking past her several times while talking loudly to his agent on his mobile, and she hadn’t reacted at all. At one point he’d deliberately looked over to her, waiting for that dazed gaze that came over people as they realized who he was, but nothing, absolutely nothing had registered in her sphinxlike face. It was this blankness that thrilled him to the bone.
“How are you today, Mr. Thomas?” The hostess, offering the menu and wine list, startled him. Jerome stared up at her blandly smiling face, furious that she had used his name, and loudly enough for all the other first-class passengers to clearly hear who they were traveling with.
“Good, thank you.” He forced himself to smile through clenched teeth and took the menu. He glanced across the aisle and saw that the Chinese businesswoman hadn’t even bothered to look up. It was as if he were a total nonentity, invisible. How was that possible?
He sat back, momentarily stunned. He couldn’t even remember the last time he hadn’t been recognized—it must have been at least fifteen years ago. The sensation was disorienting, a little like looking in the mirror and not quite recognizing your own face. Was this what his audience, the constant excitement his presence engendered in people, had become to him—a mirror? It was both a profoundly liberating and deeply intriguing thought. And intrigue in Jerome’s rarefied and choreographed world did more than excite him—it aroused him.
It then occurred to him that perhaps he should have a conversation with his agent about the Chinese distributors of his movies—was this woman’s ignorance of who he was cultural disinterest? But he knew from the number of interviews he’d given Chinese magazines, as well as the number of adverts he’d made, that he was extremely famous in at least Shanghai and most likely Beijing. In which case where had this woman been for the past fifteen years? Did she not watch movies at all? Was she such an obsessive businesswoman she simply didn’t have the time? Or perhaps she was the mistress of a top Chinese gangster—the Chinese equivalent of the Japanese yakuza—being flown to join him on some dubious sojourn in London. Jerome surreptitiously ran his eyes down her legs, looking for the telltale tattoos that were the insignia of such mafia. There were none.
He leaned back against the soft leather headrest and allowed his imagination to weave storylines starring the mysterious woman. Could she be one of those female warrior types, descended from a great aristocratic prerevolution lineage and imbued with great martial arts prowess? Suddenly he saw her floating down the aisle in a diaphanous tunic, her slim arms and legs outstretched in a kung fu pose, hands ready to lash out. Would seducing her be fucking or fighting? He’d always liked rough sex, and a woman like that could flip him on his back in seconds. Or maybe she was more of a spiritual type, a kind of Buddhist high priestess able to meditate for hours . . . he saw her perched on a remote rocky mountain crag in Tibet, cross-legged in saffron robes, eyes closed, her long black hair flying back from her serene face. Perhaps she would be able to teach him to levitate or at least overcome the fear he still secretly felt walking the red carpet on Oscars nights. Somebody so spiritual probably also knew everything about tantric sex—they would be able to have sex for hours, slow, delicious, gyrating intercourse, the kind of lovemaking that really made you transcend your own humanity and enabled you to soar through space and time. But the idea that she had made her own money rather than married it excited him the most. A rich, beautiful woman, powerful in her own right, who had no idea who he was—it couldn’t have been sexier. Jerome sighed and nestled closer to the expensive leather headrest. Maybe he had been spending too much time in L.A.
He stared across at her legs; a thin diamond anklet encircled a fine ankle, the bones as narrow and delicate as a bird’s. Jerome imagined holding that ankle, imagined his fingers would be able to wrap entirely around it. She would be tiny against his six-foot frame, a doll he could manipulate. He thought about how erotic it would feel holding that ankle high against his waist as if she were straddling him, impaled upon him. And she would be small: a hot tight fist around his cock. Suddenly the weight of the script now resting across his lap felt heavy.
“Another glass of champagne, Mr. Thomas?”
Startled again by the hostess’s voice, Jerome sat up, hiding his erection with the script. Ever the consummate actor, he didn’t even blush; instead he held up his glass to avoid the embarrassment of having the hostess bend down to fill it.
“Why not?” he replied, adopting the smile he’d crafted for his role in Loser. And now the smile, empty as it was, worked, and something in the hostess began to glow—some might have called it sexual hope—like the faint light of a ship caught in fog.
“I loved your last film,” she murmured, but loudly enough for the Chinese woman to have heard.
“Me too, wasn’t that a fabulous role?” Again, Jerome let his gaze slide across the aisle. The mysterious businesswoman was engrossed in the in-flight magazine. It was as if she hadn’t heard at all. She was utterly impervious. A shiver of pure ecstasy ran down his spine, then tightened around the head of his penis. Oh God, did he want her now.
Oblivious to his flurry of desire, the hostess bent over him to place a small bowl of cashew nuts on his side tray. A wave of the perfume Poison, sickly and cloying, drifted down with her movement, and for a second Jerome had a flash of the tiny apartment the hostess would return to between flights—the large flat screen that dominated the living room, the cat that would be waiting instead of the ex-husband, the cat litter tray beside the fridge in the tiny kitchen alcove. Suddenly Jerome felt very claustrophobic.
“And you did win the Oscar.” The hostess’s voice dropped half an octave, an affectation he imagined she thought seductive.