The Jane Austen Society(19)
“Well, she’s certainly young enough,” Mimi finally replied. “And I like her—she’s easy to work with. Doesn’t take any of this too seriously.”
Jack was watching her with a look of surprised relief. “Listen. I have a five o’clock with Harold at the Beverly Hills to discuss Eleanor and her little ‘dolls.’ Why don’t we meet for dinner after that and keep this talk going?”
“What is it with all the hotel meetings all the time? Monte wants to meet at the Chateau Marmont tonight to discuss the grinding promo tour for I’ll Never Sing Again.”
“You be careful with him. Can’t keep his dick in his pants. Waves it about like the goddamned flag.”
“Jack, honestly, the swearing.”
“Oh, trust me, honey, swearing will be the least of your problems with that guy.”
“I can handle myself.”
“I know you can.” Jack replied, although he wished this weren’t true. Wished there were some crack in the fa?ade, some little chink in the armour, that would finally let him in. That was the problem with well-bred college girls like her—they seemed to always be holding out for something, putting a guy through his paces, making sure there was something of value at the end of it all—otherwise they didn’t budge an inch.
Jack may not have been book smart, but he was shrewd enough to know that what he had to offer Mimi (the money, the power—but mainly the money) wasn’t anything she couldn’t get on her own. He was not used to feeling this redundant—it was one reason he had leapt at the chance to make a Jane Austen movie of all things. He was feeling checkmated completely off the board right now. Mimi hadn’t even let him kiss her yet, at least not a proper full-throated kiss. Her powers of restraint were proving to be unexpectedly formidable.
“Listen, Mimi, let’s make this movie. Together. We’ll be a great team, you’ll see. You don’t put up with any of my crap, and you keep me honest. And you’ll get your beloved Jane Austen out of it.”
He came over and sat down on the arm of her chair with his glass of Scotch in hand, and he heard her give the softest sound, almost a sigh. Almost, he thought, his ears pricking up, the sound of resignation.
Mimi was becoming resigned, but not to him: to herself. She had a weakness for handsome men, be they farmers or actors or university professors. Jack Leonard was definitely handsome—movie-star handsome—and a constant frisson of energy came from his striking looks meeting hers every step of the way. She was not used to that, even in Hollywood. Jack also had an over-the-top extravagance that made everything he touched jump to life. For the first and only time she identified with Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park, repining over the otherwise ill-suited Edmund Bertram: “he gets into my head more than is good for me.”
Mimi Harrison was also becoming resigned to the fact that she wanted Jack Leonard: wanted to be kissed by him, and held by him, and have him say things she knew a woman would only ever hear from him in bed. There was power in that, to be sure, but it wasn’t just about feeling emboldened. Jack had a little-boy quality that she still couldn’t quite put her finger on. The degree to which a certain look from her could hurt him—the degree to which she thought she could get him to open up his heart—seemed to be behind her crumbling resistance. Maybe this was all part of his routine with women, but if it was, he was the best damn actor she’d ever worked against.
“Jack, honestly, you don’t need to buy me—you don’t need to buy me a movie.”
He smiled, a very slow, mischievous smile. “Oh, I don’t want to buy you, Mimi. I want you for free. I want you to give yourself to me, all of you, every last inch, because you can’t stand it one more second either.”
He dipped his finger in his glass of Scotch and started to trace it along her collarbone and just below her long neck, then moved his hand down farther still. As he leaned in more, he brushed his long sleeve across her right breast (she had noticed that he never wore short-sleeved shirts except on the tennis court, no matter the heat), and she felt her skin grow warm and flushed under his touch. He tilted her chin up towards him with his other hand, and then their lips met, and everything up until that point finally made some weird kind of sense. It was as if her physical attraction to him was so deep, it had bypassed her mind, and now her mind was finally catching up to her body.
Mimi could no longer judge Marianne for preferring Willoughby over the older and more muted Colonel Brandon, only to wind up close to feverish death; she just hoped and prayed that she wouldn’t end up a sobbing, reclusive mess by the end of it all, too.
“Mimi, how lovely you look. Let me get you some champagne.”
Monte Cartwright was an older, portly man well into his fifties. The head of the studio that had made Mimi a star, he had a preternatural knack for sizing up a young actor’s marquee value from the first screen test, then locking them into a long-term contract so punitive that they would spend at least the next decade ruing the day they had ever met him.
Mimi’s ten-year contract had three years left on it, and every time she saw Monte she mentally checked off another square on the calendar of her servitude. The out-of-house projects she was allowed to do, such as the burgeoning Sense and Sensibility adaptation with Jack, had been hard-earned over time, through contract negotiations aided by her business-lawyer brother back home in Philadelphia. At age thirty-five, Mimi shrewdly understood that her only leverage with the studio came from her box-office receipts, so she continued to take on as many promising projects as she could. Some of her fellow aging actresses were already raising families or otherwise taking “breaks” that quickly became permanent in an industry where perception and momentum were everything. But Mimi kept working at building up career capital, before the tiny lines about her eyes deepened and the first grey hair showed up.