Fame and Wuthering Heights

Sabrina whipped out her cellphone. ‘Yeah, hi, this is Sabrina Leon. I’m downstairs. The moron on the desk won’t buzz me up. Would you send someone down here, please?’

She hung up, shooting the clerk a smug smile. With any luck, he’d be out of a job by morning.

It was now more than three months since Sabrina’s drunken slip of the tongue about Tarik Tyler being a slave driver, but no one seemed to want to let her move on. If they’re waiting for some kind of grovelling, Tiger Woods mea culpa, they’re gonna have a long wait, thought Sabrina defiantly. She was tired of apologizing for her existence to every black person she met in a store or on the street. I am not a goddamn racist.

A minute passed. Then five. Then twenty. Perched awkwardly on one of the leather banquettes in the lobby, Sabrina grew increasingly irritated. Where the hell was Rasmirez’s assistant?

A buzz on her phone distracted her. It was a text from Brad, the shit-hot Australian dancer she’d spent last night with. Brad was the reason she was late this morning. Sabrina prided herself on her own sexual stamina, but male dancers were always in a league of their own. She’d spotted her latest conquest on the dance floor at Les Deux last night, gyrating his perfect six-pack abs, grinding up against the identikit blonde model he’d come in with. A friend told her he was in LA on tour with Rihanna, not that Sabrina gave a fuck. He could have been White House Chief of Staff for all she cared, just as long as he ditched the blonde, took her home and fucked her till she could barely breathe.

Since getting out of rehab six weeks ago, Sabrina had only had sex once, and that was a lacklustre performance from an ex-boyfriend whom she would never have slept with if she hadn’t been drunk. Ed Steiner had pleaded with her not to go back to drinking. Sabrina had offered him a compromise – that she would only drink at home – but she was fast growing bored of her self-imposed house arrest. Playing the saint didn’t suit her. And besides, what was the point if no one was going to forgive her anyway? She only had a few more weeks left in LA, before that asshole Rasmirez shipped her off to some dreary, middle-of-nowhere location in rural England. If the press were intent on crucifying her, she was damn well going to enjoy her last supper. Brad had been a quite delicious first course.

Not even he could distract her for long though. The situation was getting ridiculous. Today was the first full cast read-through of the Wuthering Heights script, and she was now almost forty minutes late. Damned if she was going to give the jerk on the desk her name, her first instinct was to get up and leave, but a small voice of self-preservation made her hesitate. The humiliation of her lunch with Dorian Rasmirez at Il Pastaio last month still burned in her memory, and was not an experience she wanted to repeat in a hurry. Dorian, she rightly suspected, would go nuts if she pulled a no-show.

While she sat twitchily considering her options, there was a flurry of activity outside the revolving doors. The paparazzi, who’d been loitering quietly in front of the building ever since Sabrina disappeared out of shot, suddenly sprang to life again, climbing over one another like starving animals stampeding to be fed. As always when somebody else was the centre of attention rather than her, Sabrina felt a small stab of anxiety. It grew into a rather larger stab when she saw who it was.

‘Good morning.’ Viorel Hudson walked casually over to the reception desk. ‘I’m Viorel Hudson,’ he said politely. ‘I have a meeting up at Dracula Pictures. Where do I sign in?’

Dressed in a Spurr New York suit jacket over a faded grey James Perse T-shirt and dark-wash jeans, he looked relaxed and stylish. Though Sabrina was loath to admit it, he was even better looking in person than he was on screen, with his jet-black hair, strong jaw, and perfect mocha tan offsetting the deep blue of his eyes. Too pretty, she thought dismissively. No edge.

Picking up his temporary security pass, Vio turned to check his reflection in the large, lobby mirror – vain, thought Sabrina – and suddenly saw her sitting there.

‘Sabrina.’

They had never met, but Viorel recognized Sabrina instantly. She was, after all, one of the best-known faces in America, even if it was for all the wrong reasons. He extended a perfectly manicured hand. ‘Viorel Hudson. How do you do?’

Sabrina shook his hand unsmilingly. How do I do? Who does this guy think he is – Prince Charles?

She’d be sexy, thought Viorel, if only she’d wipe the sneer off her face.

‘I’m glad you’re late as well,’ he said, ignoring Sabrina’s frosty demeanour. ‘The traffic on the ten was bloody awful. Shall we head up together? Safety in numbers and all that?’

Sabrina considered the options. She could hardly stay where she was now and let him go up alone. Not without having to explain the situation with the desk clerk, which would only make her look petty.

‘Didn’t they give you a pass?’ asked Viorel, noticing she was empty handed. He turned to the desk clerk. ‘This is Sabrina Leon. She’s coming up to Dracula with me. Would you sign her in?’

The desk clerk positively beamed with satisfaction as he handed Sabrina the clipboard.

‘Certainly. Just as soon as she writes her name, like everyone else.’

Sabrina scribbled out a signature and passed it back to him, glaring.

‘You have a nice day now.’ The clerk grinned.

Sabrina did not have a nice day.

In fact, the next four hours were to be some of the longest in her life.

When the double doors to Dracula’s production office opened and she and Viorel Hudson walked in together, Dorian Rasmirez exploded. ‘What the fuck time do you call this?’ The rest of the cast, gathered around the large oval table, huddled together nervously. ‘You’re almost an hour late!’

Viorel at least had the decency to look embarrassed, apologizing profusely for keeping everyone waiting and assuring Dorian that it wouldn’t happen again.

‘Damn right it won’t,’ fumed Dorian, ‘Or I’ll want my fucking cheque back. And what the hell is your excuse?’

He turned on Sabrina, who’d quietly taken a seat at the far end of the table and appeared more interested in her cuticles than in pacifying her director. From the moment she walked into the room, Sabrina had unconsciously taken it over, shifting the centre of gravity from Dorian to herself. Even dressed down as she was today, in Love Story jeans and a plain white shirt, she dazzled. ‘I called your receptionist forty-five minutes ago,’ she said nonchalantly, not bothering to remove her sunglasses when she spoke to him. ‘No one came to get me.’

‘No one came to get you?’ Dorian stared at her contemptuously. ‘You’ve got legs, haven’t you? Walk to the fucking elevator like everyone else. You think my staff have nothing better to do than run after you like some spoiled child? Well? Do you?’

Sabrina dug her nails into her palm, forcing herself not to react, not to yell back at Dorian the way she wanted to. It was outrageously unfair. Viorel had arrived later than her, but he barely warranted a slap on the wrist. Clearly, Rasmirez was a sexist pig who got some sort of a sick kick out of publicly humiliating women. Asshole.

‘I expect people to do their jobs,’ she said calmly.

‘So do I.’ Dorian hurled Sabrina’s script across the table, narrowly missing whacking her in the face. ‘Read.’

For Dorian, Sabrina’s attitude this morning was the straw that had broken the camel’s back. The last few weeks had been breakdown-inducingly stressful.

Thanks to the location scouts’ dismal failure to find him a suitable Wuthering Heights or Thrushcross Grange in England, they were still stuck in LA and running six weeks behind schedule. His intention was to shoot as many of the interior scenes as possible at home in Romania. The Schloss was more than grand enough, it would save some money, and crucially it would allow him to spend at least part of the year under the same roof as the increasingly restless Chrissie. But most of the film had to be shot in England. They ought to have been doing today’s read-through on set, not crammed into his LA production office like a bunch of fucking sardines.

To add to his work stresses, things at home had gone from bad to worse in the last few weeks. Predictably, Chrissie had hit the roof when he told her about selling the Holmby Hills house. He’d made the mistake of doing it face to face, on a flying visit back to Romania last week.

‘You sold my home in LA, behind my back?’ Chrissie screeched, the sinews in her neck straining with rage, like a starving baby bird demanding food. Sprawled out on a chaise longue in one of the Schloss’s myriad palatial formal rooms, wearing a coffee-coloured silk La Perla negligee and matching lace-trimmed robe, she looked every inch the pampered chatelaine. ‘How dare you! I suppose now you think you can keep me and Saskia locked up here forever?’

‘No one’s trying to lock you up, honey,’ said Dorian exhaustedly. ‘I’m trying to make the best financial decisions for all of us as a family, that’s all.’

‘How?’ yelled Chrissie. ‘By selling our home to fund another one of your shitty, artistic movies? How many people actually saw Sixteen Nights? Five?’

Dorian winced. That hurt.

‘This one’ll be different,’ he said quietly. But Chrissie didn’t want to hear it. Another movie meant Dorian spending yet more time away from home, months on end in which she would be left to take care of Saskia alone in this dump while he gallivanted around the world enjoying himself.

‘I’m not going on vacation you know, honey,’ he tried to defend himself. ‘For the first months at least I’ll be stuck in LA, working my ass off, living in some shit-hole of a rented apartment.’

‘Well whose fault is that?’

‘I’ll be lonely as hell.’

‘Ha!’ Chrissie snorted viciously. ‘Lonely. You don’t know the meaning of lonely. It’s Saskia and I who’ll be lonely. You’ll be off banging your leading lady.’

‘For God’s sake!’ Dorian lost his temper. ‘You seriously think I’m interested in Sabrina Leon?’

‘Why wouldn’t you be?’ pouted Chrissie.

‘Because she’s a child,’ said Dorian, ‘an irresponsible child. I’ll be babysitting her, not sleeping with her. Besides, you know damn well you’re the only woman for me. How do you think I feel, having to leave you here, knowing every man on this estate wants you?’ Bending down over the chaise longue, he ran a hand along his wife’s taut, Pilates-toned thigh. Even after so many years together, just touching her made him feel ridiculously aroused.

Slowly, Chrissie parted her thighs, allowing him a glimpse of her newly waxed pussy. She’d deliberately had a Brazilian the day before Dorian was due to leave, knowing how anxious it would make him. ‘Don’t go then,’ she said, coyly.

‘I have to go,’ he whispered, his voice hoarse with longing. ‘I need to do this movie, Chrissie. We need it.’

Chrissie sat up, clamping her legs shut like a librarian slamming closed a book. ‘Fine,’ she snapped. ‘But don’t you dare complain to me about how hard this is for you.’