Free Leading Man by Benjamin Svetkey Page B

celebrity had ever asked me that before—interviews were always one-way conversations. I asked, they answered. But now that a star finally had asked me a serious question, I found myself stumbling for an answer. Of course, like every journalist, I’d wondered what life on the other side of the tape recorder might be like. Maybe I was even a little jealous. The actor stuffing his face with sushi in front of me had an earned annual income larger than several European nations. He had a watch on his wrist worth more than most people’s houses. He had a shelf in his living room cluttered with little golden men. What exactly did I have? Still, fame wasn’t something I had ever even remotely craved. I honestly never hungered for the spotlight or fantasized about signing autographs. No, my fascination with celebrity was driven by a totally different sort of ego deficiency.
    “I just want the money and adoration,” I answered Lyon, half-joking. “I don’t care about the rest.”
    In fact, all I really wanted was the girl.

7
    “I’m on a beach in Mykonos,” Sammy said. “That’s in Greece, in case you didn’t know. And I’m not wearing a top.”
    It was three in the morning in New York—ten in the morning on the clothing-optional Greek beach Sammy was calling me from on her cell—and I had been floating in deep dream space when the phone woke me up. As accustomed as I was to her late-night calls, it always took me a few seconds to rev my brain up to conversational speed. I leaned back on my pillow and imagined Sammy strolling bare-chested on the shores of the sparkling Mediterranean, her naked skin shimmering in the sunshine, until I let a small groan escape into the phone. I covered it up with a fake cough. “What are you doing in Mykonos?” I groggily asked.
    “Johnny is doing location scouting for the next Montana movie,” she said. “They’re thinking of shooting a scene at the Acropolis. They want Johnny to throw bad guys off a European monument in this movie. Somethingabout it being good for overseas box office. Personally, I think it’s a great idea. I love it here. The beaches are spectacular. Did I mention I’m not wearing a top?”
    Sammy could be a terrible tease, but she didn’t mean anything by it. We had known each other so well for so long, it was impossible for her to be anything other than completely herself. I, on the other hand, had no such luxury. I was still cloaking myself in platonic sheep’s clothing, pretending to be fine with being just friends, while secretly hoping that her marriage to Johnny would fall apart. In the meantime, though, I had to be careful. If Sammy knew how I truly felt about her—what picturing her topless on a Greek beach did to my respiratory system—she might pull back. I couldn’t risk that.
    “I’ve never been to Greece,” I said. “I should find a Greek movie set and get an assignment. Sounds like you’re beautiful.
It’s
beautiful. Greece, that is … being beautiful …”
    “You know,” she said, whispering into her cell phone, “the beaches here aren’t just topless—they’re bottomless, too. But I don’t know if I could handle that. I can’t really see myself being totally naked on a beach, can you?”
    Oh, I could imagine it, all right. In fact, I had enough footage of Samantha stored in the film cans of my fantasy life to splice together an epic longer than
Shoah
. And not
all
of it was sex related. Sometimes, for instance, I’d fantasize about time travel. I’d flip the calendar back to the night in 1995 when Sammy turned up at my apartment at two in the morning after her fight with her new movie star boyfriend. In my rewrite, when I ask her if she truly loves Johnny, her big brown eyes fill with tears. “I’m still in lovewith you,” she tells me. We embrace passionately. The next day, Page Six leads with a story about how Johnny Mars’s girlfriend has dumped him for a dashing magazine writer in the West Village. The
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