Second Chance - Jane Green [67]
He doesn’t blame her for making him turn to alcohol, but certainly alcohol made the rejection easier to bear. It excused his bad behaviour when he started looking elsewhere for the love and affection he craved. It made him feel strong and invincible; that it didn’t matter that the one person in the world he wanted didn’t seem to want him in return.
Now he thinks bitterly that it was a marriage orchestrated by their agents. He wishes he’d known it at the time. It would have saved him a lifetime of pain if he’d known she had always seen it as a business arrangement.
So he turned to other women, but what he had never found before Saffron was love. He had never found intimacy and had never trusted that anyone loved him for him rather than for being a rich and famous actor.
LA abounded with young gorgeous women who would drop their knickers at the bat of an eyelid and, for a while, that was enough, but when he found Saffron and got to know her slowly in the safety of their shared AA meetings, he knew what he had been missing.
He has spoken to his manager more times than he cares to think about of leaving his wife and being with Saffron. His manager, his agent, and his publicist all agree: it will be career death. He can’t do it. He doesn’t tell Saffron he thinks about this all the time, doesn’t want to give her false hope, but he thinks that, at some point in his career, he will be able to stop, buy a ranch in Montana, leave his old life behind and create a new one with Saffron.
For Saffron is not the only one with fantasies. P has fantasies of family life. He has fantasies of a wife who loves him, who sleeps cuddled up to him at night, who supports him unequivocally in the choices he makes. He has dreams of children – a pack of kids running around laughing – and of his wife showering them all with kisses and fun. He dreams of wide-open spaces, of horses, of owning land. And he still can’t quite believe the choice he made when he married his wife.
A good friend though she may be, she doesn’t want children. She doesn’t like animals. Her idea of a perfect house is the mansion they are currently in, in Bel Air, expertly decorated by the top decorators in town, beautiful to look at but nothing about it spells home.
In the beginning, he vaguely recalls, they would talk about their vision for their lives. He remembers her saying she wanted a production company, but she also said she wanted kids. He told her of his vision of the ranch, and she said it sounded wonderful. She said a lot of things in those days, he realizes now. A lot of things he wanted to hear, very few of them true.
When he first came into AA, he hated her. He resented her for trapping him in a loveless marriage, hated her for lying to him, could barely bring himself to talk to her. They would sit in limos on the way to premieres, arguing fiercely, then step into the flash of light bulbs with equal megawatt smiles on their faces, stopping for the film crews to demonstrate how much they loved one another.
They gave interviews about the strength of their marriage, the things that they loved about each other, and with every one he believed he was giving the performance of his life, easily Oscar-winning, if faking undying affection were ever to be added as a category.
The twelve-step programme gave him the gift of acceptance. He learnt to accept her rather than hate her because she wasn’t who he wanted her to be. It was never going to be the marriage he wanted, he realized, but he also realized he had a choice: he could stay in a slump of self-pity and resentment, and stay a victim for the rest of his life, or he could change the way he looked at his life and embrace it exactly as it was.
And just as he had learnt to accept it, to accept that his marriage was a great friendship and a wonderful working arrangement, Saffron had walked into the meeting and captured his heart.
There is no such thing as coincidence. There is no doubt in his mind