Love in LA: Sugar Daddy Boasting and Bored Housewives, Part II

Swimming in simultaneous sociological considerations kineographing through my mind, I lifted the one eyebrow I can and said, "Hmm... indoor/outdoor. 'Summertime Sadness.'" Bill looked quizzically at me, and I put my finger on my chin. I thought as a self-proclaimed sugar daddy he would have at least a cursory understanding of Lana Del Rey's oeuvre. "Maybe she could expand into popsicles. To go with the tables?" A flashbulb memory of Crayola Magic Scent crayons in dirt and pine and "fresh air." The faux grass itself seemed to trounce any attempt at creativity that veered out of pure camp. "Or, ooh, what about carbonated ones? Call it... ummm... Fizzickle." I tucked my chin, smirking.

Bill looked at me like I imagined he might regard child on the precipice of a grand and whimsical discovery. But then in a small voice: "Is there a K?"

I considered this. "Originally I thought yes but now maybe no. The 'ick' presents obvious problems. Or implies something to do with pickles."

Bill grimaced performatively and nodded gravely. "I would just be worried about the Popsicle brand coming after us. So, I-C-L-E is probably out."

I was astounded. "So, to be inspired by the word 'icicle' is illegal. America." I swished my hair disdainfully.

"I'm afraid so." Bill was chuckling and I blew sharp breath through my nostrils.

I pulled up Popsicle parent Unilever's market cap: $120B, so chances were they had counsel. I shrugged off my facetious brainstorming sessions when I remembered that the lady of the manor had no strict need or possibly even desire to succeed in the capitalistic sense. Such a situation had historically proven to be an ideal matrix for artistic innovation, which I internally conceded could very well be an emergent trait.

After a few drinks, things went a bit swimmy. Bill was half-muttering about redoing the liability waivers for his kids' pool parties when I spotted a zipline suspended over the softly glowing sapphire expanse. Drunk and dramatic, I pointed at it accusingly. "What is that?"

Bill squinted; I think he first thought I was referring to the miniature Bellagio fountain that was spilling intersecting plumes and sheets of neon-lighted water into the pool, but he quickly caught on. The child within me, nursed with the wine, burst forth from its bucking chute and I heedlessly clopped across the perfect grass in my Frye ankle boots, sensible black pants and navy blazer. I heard muffled words of encouragement (or warning?) from the direction of the turf table as I clambered up the wooden stairs to the zipline platform. Although could see the relatively slack line curving alarmingly close to the surface, I forged on, flush with the cascading nervous confidence of overstimulation. Across the hazy lawn I could make out a thumbs-up and that was all the encouragement I needed to take the plunge. Instead of moving forward hooked to a taut line, I dropped in the manner of an acrobat swinging off a trapeze platform—a bad sign, to be sure, but I was somehow still mercifully above water. My objective quickly switched from carefree fun to a madcap attempt at preserving my attire and self-esteem. Confusion fused with very LA insecurities of the "I must be heavier than I look" kind even as my doomed footwear and outstretched and futilely upheld slacks-clad legs crested the glowing aquamarine surface.

"Eeeeeeeeeeeee," I whined helplessly. In seconds I was submerged and fighting against physics to at least keep my coiffed hair dry. I watched Bill bolt across the grass, almost pole-vaulting over his cane multiple times. Shakily I swam to the edge of the pool but couldn't locate a ladder or stairs. The seemingly interminable floundering was making my case to redeem my Frye warranty grow flimsier and I more embarrassed, both of which (along with the cold water) heightened my panic. From the rim of the world Bill reached for me but, scared to pull him in and unsure whether my week of lifeguard training at age 15 would bear fruit here, I instead swung one leg over the edge, basically mounting the coping (I know) and trying to use the strength of one inner thigh to lever myself onto dry land. After several mortifying attempts in which I clawed frantically at the pool deck before crashing back into the water, I was victorious. Panting mightily, I stayed dazed on the ground like a sopping pile of clothes, which I partially was.

Bill's face was ashen, and he trembled. "I... am... so... sorry," he spluttered. He did not strike me as someone who apologized on a daily basis.

Waterlogged and spent, I smiled wanly up at him and issued a few amiable mutterings before shucking off my soaked shoes and scrambling to stand. Bill bravely offered the other half of his cane's handle for me to grab on to, but again I thought better of turning the interaction into this Carol Burnett sketch. When I got to my feet, we were face to face. Pale, stricken and wide-eyed, Bill stammered to speak first, to be the doting Hollywood host and not the daredevilish sexual glutton (I regarded him as at least a voyeur in Babylon, not unlike myself). I shivered. Behind water-spattered glasses, his eyes were fascinators: at the fanciful confluence of icy predator and cowering prey, faintly darting and flecked with flinty gray shards.

"I shouldn't have let you do that," he said. I winced. For all the body positivity I afforded others, I was chagrined at the prospect of being the LA equivalent of the mother in "What's Eating Gilbert Grape."

"Let me get you... something to wear and we can dry your clothes." Bill beckoned me back inside, over the luxuriant lawn and under the gray cloud cover charged with light pollution.

Bill gestured with what appeared to be momentary jazz hands when we reached the doors and tapped a cork doormat with his cane. "Dry your feet," he said, with a not unkind edge to his voice that portended his next statement. "My wife's girlfriend slipped" -- a barely perceptible flinch -- "when they came in from the hot tub with wet feet. I ordered some rugs for the floor, but..." He seemed to be on the brim of launching into what I was coming to consider a convergently evolved chestnut of the insufferable affluent: the de rigueur mild but drawn-out rant about the house manager or interior designer or jet pilot or contractor or other career servitor of opulence who had failed to go "That's So Raven" on the global supply chain and thereby prevent the given wretched inconvenience. We passed through the glass wall and over said hazardous uncarpeted marble until a right, where a short hallway ended at a bathroom. Bill ducked into a room I hadn't yet noticed: a large children's playroom with games and toys strewn over brightly colored foam puzzle mats.

"Oh... so, how many kids do you have?" I softened my voice to dull my candor. Bill shifted uncomfortably and I got the sense that he rarely if ever brought dates or even guests here: I watched his eyes pinball from one out-of-place thing to the next, and I believed I saw him swallow his urge to gather and put away. Despite the museumlike lighting and materials congruent with the rest of the home, this space was warm and loud and lived in, with abundant trinkets and photos uninhibitedly divulging snapshots of the inhabitants' stories. Growing up I had always known these to be conversation pieces, used in gatherings to recall and recite raucous or poignant stories and memories. Later I discovered this was not always so in the hermetic, high-stakes and high-flying world of optics permanence.

"My son, Chase... and the twins. Jesse and Scarlet." Bill seemed to relax into the interaction; he moved across the room to the sleek light-wood wall of built-in, picture-frame-lined shelves and cupboards. I imagined that his mind had previously been struggling to categorize the nature of the evening. Perhaps opening a bottle of wine alone with a young woman rarely occurred outside of his extramarital hookups. I tried to keep an open mind—people can have friends of any age and gender, I thought, nearly careening into a low-stakes paradox-of-tolerance conundrum—but low expectations of men kept me healthily wary.

I showered in the luxuriant guest bath with Aesop geranium leaf body wash, then dried off with an impossibly fluffy towel, pulled on the grayish-white Free City sweatsuit that Bill had left rolled up on the counter and padded back into the playroom. Bill was sitting rigidly on a cozy aniline leather sofa that would be wildly out of place in the formal living room I'd passed earlier in the evening. I considered whether to sit next to him and if so, how far apart? I played it off with a giggle and perched beside him with an approximately ten-inch gap between us.

Bill closed his eyes and we sat in silence, neither touching nor perceptibly drawn to each other but rather sharing a "breathing the same air" intimacy that I think we both found refreshing for superficially different but ultimately similar reasons. He suddenly laid down, put his head on my lap and curled into the fetal position. As during the rest of the evening, his vibe was chaste, but he clearly felt he could be vulnerable on some level, which I found transfixing. I finally felt I understood why the absurd, listicle-ready title—but arguably important service—of "professional cuddler" exists. Physically weakened, awkward and dysfunctional, Bill prompted a flush of empathy that brought bemusement given that I was at least subconsciously repulsed by his attitudes toward women, sex, relationships, eyewear and undoubtedly multitudinous other things. I felt on some level he felt safe behind his masks—Hollywood executive; self-styled sugar daddy—the way I acknowledged to myself that now and then I hid behind silence or quiet wit (to say nothing of dissociative diversions), alternately eavesdropping and brandishing intellect like a glinting palmed knife while keen interest in and consuming fear of the world shocked me hot and cold. The you who observes, and the you who experiences, both fumbling for weightlessness...

I was gently but definitively snapped out of my reverie when Bill sighed, his head still on my thigh.

"I'm so tired." I could have predicted him saying it, written the cliche line, filled it in during a subliminal retcon session. I thought of the Beatles song, which had never been more relatable, though I was not yet clear on what exactly Bill would give me in exchange for a little peace of mind. When he spoke, his voice was tinged with a new fragility, an exhalation of tension that was nonetheless tinny and dissonant with insecurity. I didn't say anything and watched him flick his eyes up at me; he very slightly shrank away. His chestnut-dyed hair was feathery in the desiccated manner of a much older person, and I gently ran my fingertips over a small area of it, feeling the thin skin beneath the wisps. I was in uncharted territory and felt a paraphilic thrill as my senses struggled to understand the thin straddled line between playing embalmer and ingenue in this somehow extra-ephemeral scene.

"You're an interesting guy." I shrugged almost imperceptibly. I could have been lying, but to a voracious observer of the world, predictability doesn’t necessarily preclude interest.

Bill chuckled. "I hear that a lot... on first dates but I can tell you mean something different."

"Mmm..." I turned my head slightly and took in the sleek beige window treatments. "Wait. What?" I realized I had assumed I understood.

Bill sucked in air. "Well, it's the same word, but I can't recall ever hearing it..." -- his hands slowly crept to cover his face -- "...both warm and clinical... like you'd be interested in a subject in school. Architecture. Art history."

"Philosophy," I added, then: "That's...kind of accurate." I kept brushing my fingers on the same tiny square of his temple with bas-relief blue veins. "I don't mean to offend you," I said, taking my hand from its spiderlike position and lightly rubbing my chest below my collarbone. I felt awkwardness like magma rising in my trachea and yet somehow also a growing dreamlike ease, and Bill seemed to be experiencing a version of the same. He shook his head, silently refuting that I had crossed him.

I inhaled. "I used to only be able to talk to adults. As a kid, I mean. I wanted someone to take care of me, and other kids couldn’t... nor should they have tried... but this flipped once I got to be a young adult at boarding school, and I looked at people my age... I wanted to make up for lost time with peers but also." I breathed in, held it. "I was stuck on finding someone to care for me. Like a parent. To believe they'll be there tomorrow. To believe that them being there will affect how I feel for the better. It can be... it's exhausting." I reached for my wine glass; realized my mouth was beyond parched; reconsidered.

*SRP and Martin, Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, 2019*

Bill jerked his gaze up at me, seeming to study my face for a moment and to maybe relax further although his furrowed brow telegraphed worry (anger?). "I didn't realize that someone... that you 've ever felt so..." He swallowed and then composed himself. "I'm glad you feel like you can talk to me."

At that moment Bill soundlessly sat up. He smoothed his shirt and stood.

"Please, I..." he reached for me to help me stand up. I could tell he was trying like hell to muster another apology, so I quickly said, "It's funny. I didn't think I would, um, talk about myself. Or fall into the pool, for that matter. But I thought you would feel better to know I'm not j-- to know I have empathy. For you." I watched his face relax into a natural sadness. Once again I thought this simply could not be Vice's profiled Priapus, but then I had the insight that I had neither seen him really be an asshole nor a non-asshole—that is to say, I was likely mistaking an apparent absence of vice for virtue. I'm sure I was subconsciously elated that the man I was currently alone with seemed harmless, even if only in the manner of a fearsome killer who, aged and long confined, could no longer feasibly offend even if freed (not quite Grandpa Sawyer from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but definitely in that wheelhouse.)

Bill offered his hand to help me up from the couch; I gingerly grasped it but again took pains not to rely on his frame and risk the both of us collapsing onto the unsympathetically hard and utterly expensive floor below. When I stood up, first slowly and then all at once, I was again at eye level with him and looked away, bashful. A chance glance at my watch let me know that it was 2:26 a.m., when nothing good ever happens in Beverly Hills.

"Ahm." I chose to tear myself away, to not delve deeper into feeding alongside him from the trough of nihilistic hedonism so rote that it paradoxically verged on austerity. "Bill, I um... I should be going." Of course, I half-wanted to stay in the liminality of the evening, to watch it unfold as though I really were just watching. "I'm sure you've... got... meetings." I shrugged and scoffed at the same time in the universal gesture of playing it cool.

Bill's frowned. "Oh, I'm terribly... thank you for coming." He ran a cupped hand over his faintly liver-spotted pate. "You know I, I, I, understand that the pool was probably... I really understand if you're not. Interested." There were shades of ambiguity in whether he was talking about the job or our budding friendship (for lack of a better term). The confident braggart I had met at Sushi Roku (formerly Hamburger Hamlet, as one LA-native elder millennial friend told me after I published Part 1) seemed a distant alter ego.

I felt the hangover like a storm's first thunderclap: still questionable (was it a garbage truck clanging a metal bin?) but understood to be inevitable (OK, might as well bring in the outdoor furniture cushions). My eyes shuttered and I pushed out a platitude, some salve for the situation. My sober eyes on the evening were far too sharp and I continued to squint.

"Oh!" He perked up. "I have something. For you."

I looked askance as he shuffled off, across the great white expanse of the open plan floor and up a sweeping staircase. He seemed a bit healthier than before, but not so much to suggest he had been malingering.

I must have dissociated because it felt like seconds later that Bill was standing beside me and pressing a dainty pale-pink envelope into my palm. I blinked, eased the card out. It felt a bit bumpy and thick for all its paper delicacy, and I quickly uncovered why when a paper Ferris wheel sprang up from the page. Beneath it, a message: "Dearest Samantha—Thank you for sharing the adventure." Puzzlingly sweet, I thought; apropos. Although we hadn't even kissed and it was still nighttime, I felt the penitence of daylight on an ill-conceived sexual encounter. After all, I had seen him curl into the fetal position and assume the posture of a pet or a baby on my lap. I had brushed my fingertips against his thinned skin and felt there is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize.

"Could you um... Do you have Venmo? I remember I didn't order your Uber." He seemed to flit into the mental space he may have entered (assuming his sugar-rush stories were all true) at the end of the night, when post-coital clarity would collide with necessary logistics and lean on fast-forward button in his mind's eye.

I opened the app the double-check my username. "How are you feeling?" I asked as I was walloped by another hangover pang. "I don't think I drank enough water," I moaned, at once morose and joking.

"Hmm." Again, a question Bill was unprepared for. "I feel great." He said it so nonchalantly that I nearly believed him.

I showed him my phone screen, chewed my lip and, almost never too hungover to make a pithy statement, piped up: "You know I really think we're all the most striking mix of hardy and delicate." Wild fennel's fernlike spring shoots and late-season woody stems leapt to mind. The very comparison introduced a cluster of common fallacies: that a bamboolike husk on the brink of desiccation is "hardy"; that time always begets toughening.

Bill looked down at me with curious admiration as my fingers tapped and swiped on glass to summon another stranger to take me home. When it was done, I quickly looked up at him from my seated position and could almost see it: the viper in any given denizen of Hollywood, ever fated to hunt for survival.

When I arrived home, I saw Bill had Venmoed me way too much money for new shoes after his pool claimed mine. Well, he sent enough for Louboutins, but I try not to go over $200 (Quelle surprise -- because of incidents like this). Surprisingly I felt precious little awkwardness after our bemusing encounter, and what there was surrounded the zipline gaffe (he'd assured me, potentially for my pride, that it wasn't broken and the carabiner had merely gotten off track). I went on to edit some of his book, but it never got picked up by a publisher he found satisfactory and he decided to scrap the whole thing and stay on the DL. (Also, the #MeToo movement gained magnificent traction a year after I met him in 2016, just as his agent was shopping it. While Bill never confessed anything to me, he was part of some inner circles that were suddenly attracting what even P.T. Barnum might have considered "bad publicity.") In her '90s memoir, "Swimming Underground: My Years in the Warhol Factory," Mary Woronov wrote "Even I knew this was not the way to Hollywood." Stripped of its context the phrase encapsulates what I walked away from this episode with, but as foremost an insatiable student of human folly I found the conclusion sufficiently satisfying.