Birdie could taste blood in the water.
She hoped that it wasn’t hers.
Part 2: AMERICA’S SWEETHEART DOUBLE-FAULTS
By Elliot O’Brien
Our quest to find Birdie Robinson’s anonymous suitor has brought us to the glittering landscape of Los Angeles. Deep in Silver Lake, through winding, unmarked roads, we land at a picturesque bungalow with a freshly painted deep navy door and a picture-perfect man behind it.
Meet Carter LeRoux, retired professional tennis player whose best showing at a tournament was the quarter finals at the US Open in 2011, and now tennis pro to the stars. Which included Ms. Robinson at one point in their recent past. LeRoux, who has an easy demeanor and an infectious laugh, greeted me with a joyous baritone, a rescue dog straight out of ASPCA magazine, and skin that looked like it had a pricey antioxidant regimen.
Ms. Robinson was feeling shy, having been so derided in our first attempt at reconciliation with Chef Ian Sands, and opted to linger behind. I assured her that if it were good news, I’d immediately text her and unite the happy couple. Unfortunately, it was not good news. In fact, so far, Ms. Robinson is now love-thirty, and the question she now faces is: How many points will she play while continuing to swing and miss, to take an aceright to the far corner, to double-fault at match point? (Forgive the tennis puns, I couldn’t help myself.)
Mr. LeRoux, as he explained to me, is currently engaged. His happy home is filled with photos of his stunning fiancée, the life they’ve built together, and one photogenic, extremely well-trained rescue dog, Lucy. If I weren’t a nomadic reporter who so rarely stayed in one place, I’d have asked if I could have adopted Lucy out from under them. Or have the couple adoptme.
Though Ms. Robinson and I are operating under the theory that the letter is several years old, Mr. LeRoux assured me, and I believed him, that he is not the sort of man who trips down his past with regrets. He rarely thinks of our favorite actress, he said, though he clarified and said he is certainly a fan of some of her movies, though he couldn’t name many when pressed. He finally managed to citeLove Bomb—not exactly a deep dive into her résumé. It seems that while Ms. Robinson lingered on the notion that Mr. LeRoux could be her potential happily-ever-after, Mr. LeRoux hasn’t lingered on her much at all.
Which led me to the question I asked myself while leaving his bungalow. What if no one in her past actually wants to reconcile? What if we go on this quest and her ex-suitor has changed his mind (not outside the realm of possibility, given Ms. Robinson’s recent press about both her temper and her behavior), or what if we simply come up empty? Will Birdie Robinson, who always gets her happily-ever-after on-screen, simply forge on alone?
27
ELLIOT
Elliot emerged fromthe camper bathroom, where he’d splashed water on his face and brushed his teeth and pulled on a pair of sweats and the button-down Birdie had worn yesterday, to a significantly chillier vibe than when he’d gone in. And things hadn’t been particularly warm to start with. The make-out session had been a massive miscalculation, not just because his feelings for Birdie were blurring together in some sort of mosh pit of love and lust and protectiveness and regret and irritation and professional responsibility. All Birdie had to do was tell Imani or Sydney, and all Imani and Sydney had to do was tell Francesca, whom they surely knew, as members of these circles tended to, and that would be that. He’d promised his editor that he could keep it aboveboard, and it had been three days and all had gone to hell.
Birdie Maxwell made Elliot do all sorts of reckless things.
“Why are all of you staring at me?” he asked from the rear of the camper. He glanced down to ensure that he didn’t still have a hard-on. Thankfully, no.
“The article,” Birdie screeched.
“What article?” Elliot asked, then took a few steps toward her. Until he got a better look at her face, which was curled up into an unnerving blend of rage and beauty, like she was some sort of ethereal goddess of fury, and he stopped cold.
“Your article,” she shouted, and took her own three steps toward him. “Carter is engaged? Carter couldn’t even name one of my movies? Carter has a fucking rescue dog named Lucy?”
“That... that...” Elliot sputtered.
“You could haveat leasttold me that Carter was engaged before Ihad to read itwith the rest of the world. Did you not have enough time yesterday? Did you not have any opportunities? Were the four hours in this godforsaken rattling box on wheels not enough? The night spent sleeping under each other—”
Imani gasped and Sydney popped her eyebrows, so Birdie aborted the tirade for a brief interlude.
“No, I meant in the bunk beds,” she said to them, and they both visibly relaxed, like Elliot was goddamn sexual napalm, but then maybe his reputation preceded him with them too.It’s all consensual fun and games until you’re thought of as a gigolo, he thought.
“Birdie,” he said.
“Your TV voice, O’Brien. Do. Not. Placate. Me. With. Your. TV. Voice.”
“Bird,” Elliot said, trying to recalibrate. “I didn’t know the piece published. It was a draft. It wasn’t meant to—” He shook his head. He knew this sounded flimsy. Ridiculous. Excuses that even a middle school teacher wouldn’t accept. But that didn’t make his story any less true. “Yesterday, when the engine was... going, and you pulled off the road, I guess I thought we might die?”
Imani snorted, and Sydney shushed her, even as Birdie crossed her arms and narrowed her eyes.
“And, so I uploaded the draft,” Elliot rambled. “It was a draft, I promise. I swear. I swear on... whatever is most valuable to you.” He watched Birdie try to think of the most valuable thing that she kept close to her heart, and when she didn’t offer it, he continued. “Francesca and I have a system. I have no idea why she ran with it.”
He winced, genuinely pained that his petty words were flying around the internet. He’d been childish and catty when he was pounding the story into his laptop. He was sick with jealousy over Carter’s amiable, easygoing affection for Birdie, and he was annoyed with her for... he couldn’t even remember why they were squabbling yesterday, but, well, the conflation of those two things meant that he wrote a draft just for himself. He did that sometimes: wrote the vomit version to get it out of his system. Those iterations were never meant for an audience other than of one. And now Francesca had put it live on the site? He had figured that Francesca would be pissed he blew his deadline last night; he didn’t think she’d go ahead and publish the piece without him signing off. Which, of course, he couldn’t do, because cell service went out as quickly as it came last night, here, on the side of the road in the middle of fucking nowhere. He was used to this sort of hiccup in remote locations, sparse, run-down cites. He and Francesca had a language:DRAFTmeant he was just trying to salvage what he could before the signal blew up, and he’d return to it as soon as it was safe to do so.
“The article, the way you made it sound like I am destined to be alone forever—” Birdie was already in the middle of a thought when she started in on him again. Elliot watched her chest rise, like she was gearing up to detonate. “Which, it should be noted, is completely fine. Who says I need aguy? Who says I need truelove? Maybetrue loveis just a misguided fairy tale that we see in the movies.”
“I didn’t, I don’t—” Elliot tried to recalibrate. “I wasn’t trying to—” He understood that this was not the moment to point out that she was the very one selling the fairy tale and selling it well.
