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Here's to Us(32)
Author: Elin Hilderbrand

“I took a taxi because I was drinking at dinner,” Hayes said. “The driver and I had an argument about the way he was taking me into town, so he stopped, and I got out. And then, I guess, I got mugged. I don’t remember anything else.”

“The police found him in the state forest,” Laurel said to Buck. “All his cash is gone, and his credit cards and his driver’s license.”

“What did the doctor say?” Buck asked. “Anything broken? Concussion?”

“No,” Hayes said. “My face is going to look like a Halloween mask for a while, and it’s going to hurt, but it’s okay. They gave me a bunch of painkillers.”

Intermezzo: Deacon and Belinda, Part I

Los Angeles is all swimming pools and vodka martinis. When Belinda introduces Deacon to her friends and colleagues as a chef, they all, to a person, say, “Oh, like Wolfgang Puck?” Puck has the town locked up. Everyone eats at Spago. Is there even room for another chef?

In their new life in Los Angeles, Belinda pays for everything. She buys Deacon new clothes. She buys him Gucci loafers that pinch, but she insists they will stretch and conform to Deacon’s feet. He doesn’t tell her that he’s never owned a real pair of shoes before. He has made it through life in Chuck Taylors, flip-flops, and kitchen clogs.

Belinda is renting a house in Beverly Hills that has a heated pool and a gym with a steam sauna and a screening room. The kitchen is bigger than Deacon and Laurel’s entire apartment on West 119th Street. This makes Deacon feel guilt at first, intense, piercing guilt that brings him down. He was busy in New York, but here in L.A., he has hours of unstructured time. When Belinda is busy or away—which is more often than he anticipated—he is at loose ends. There is a whole city to explore; he could go to the Getty Museum or to the beaches of Malibu or to Disneyland. He has never been anywhere Disney before, and it intrigues him. But instead, Deacon lies in bed watching TV, and then, when he gets up, he goes out drinking. He can’t go anywhere stylish—not the Wilshire or the Beverly Hills Hotel—because someone will recognize him, and it’ll get back to Belinda. And so, he seeks out dive bars. He goes to Compton and South Central. He goes to Anaheim.

When Belinda is around, Deacon is happier. They watch movies in the screening room and always end up making love in the extra-wide reclining seats. They lie by the pool—Deacon in the sun, Belinda under an umbrella. Deacon swims laps, but Belinda won’t even dip her feet. Deacon teases her about this. It’s like drinking decaf coffee or nonalcoholic beer, he says. The point of coffee is caffeine, the point of beer is alcohol, and the point of having a pool is swimming in it! Belinda won’t budge.

They go to a Dodgers game; they ride the Ferris wheel on Santa Monica Pier. Belinda takes Deacon to a party on Mulholland Drive at the house of James Brinegar, who directed her in Between the Pipes. Jaime is a super-cool guy, intellectual and erudite, but fun, too. He’s a huge fan of the Clash, and he takes Deacon to his man cave to show him his collection of memorabilia, including a picture of Jaime with Joe Strummer on the beach in Ibiza, and Deacon thinks he may have found a friend.

Jaime brings out a mirror and taps out two long lines of cocaine. Deacon starts shaking just looking at it.

“We’ll race,” Jaime says. “Whoever finishes first snorts what’s left of his opponent’s line.”

“You’re on,” Deacon says, confident he will win. And he does.

Maybe Jaime is angry about being bested in his own home, because he turns to Deacon and says, “You know I used to bang Belinda, right?”

Cocaine turns Deacon into a monster under the best of circumstances. Upon hearing Jaime say the words “bang Belinda,” Deacon punches Jaime right in the face and knocks him to the ground, where Deacon starts kicking the living shit out of him. Someone in the other room hears breaking glass and comes rushing in to save Jaime’s life.

The police take Deacon off the property in handcuffs. Belinda is crying. She isn’t allowed in the cruiser, but she follows Deacon to the police station in her Jaguar. She is famous enough and beautiful enough, he supposes, that he is only charged with drunk and disorderly, and not with assault and battery.

“He told me he’d banged my girl,” Deacon says to the arresting officer. “What was I supposed to do?”

Belinda had said she would get Deacon his own restaurant so that he could be his own boss, but after his arrest and the attendant humiliation, Deacon can’t bring himself to ask. Eventually, Belinda forgives him; she decides he was being gallant, defending her honor. She buys Deacon a Porsche 911—his own freaking Porsche. He should be the happiest man in L.A., and yet somehow, he’s not.

It’s always sunny, which depresses Deacon. He starts to long for the gloomy, overcast days of New York in November. He yearns for a thunderstorm, something to match his temperament. He calls Laurel and Hayes every single day, sometimes more than once a day, but more and more often, Laurel doesn’t answer. One weekend a month, Deacon flies back to New York to see Hayes, and every time, he considers staying. He and Laurel talk about getting back together, conversations that always end with Laurel saying, “You won’t leave her. I know you won’t. She’s too strong, and you’re not strong enough.”

Deacon fears she’s right.

A popular pastime in California is finding oneself, and Deacon gets swept along. He needs to find himself. He needs a job. Deacon and Belinda eat at Spago. They eat at the Ivy. Deacon toys with getting a job in the kitchen of one or the other, but how can he work as a line cook when he’s dating the most sought-after actress in Hollywood?

When summer rolls around, Deacon persuades Belinda to go to Nantucket, although the second she agrees, he starts to worry. As much as he loves the house, when he looks at it through her eyes, he sees only what’s wrong with it: a peeling linoleum floor in the kitchen, rooms that haven’t been painted in twenty-five years, sand permanently embedded between the floorboards.

Matters are made worse when they arrive in the middle of a nor’easter—driving rain and wind gusts up to fifty miles an hour. Nantucket is the greatest place on earth on a sunny summer day, but in the rain, it’s worthless. They’ve been in the house less than an hour—just enough time for Belinda to perfect her “brave face”—when the power goes out. Deacon figures this is either the best-case scenario or the worst. He lights a fire, he brings pillows and a blanket down from the bedroom, he makes a nest. He finds a bag of marshmallows in the cabinet—bingo!

“Cozy, right?” he says to her. He’s afraid she’s going to turn her nose up at him or start screaming, because in this kind of wind, the house feels like a cup of dice God is shaking. Life with Belinda, he’s realized, is a prison of high expectations.

She surprises him by snuggling up and resting her head against his heart. “Right,” she says.

It’s in the rudimentary kitchen of the Nantucket house that Deacon starts to develop recipes. Belinda has a sweet tooth, so he makes a fluffy white champagne cake with champagne icing and champagne-candied strawberries.

When she tastes it, she swoons.

“Oh my God,” she says. She says that she has never been as in love with anyone or anything as much as him… and that cake. “Let’s make a baby.”

It’s six months later, and, although sex is now Deacon’s cool second job, he can’t get Belinda pregnant. She goes to the doctor and gets checked out and insists he do the same. He jerks off in a cup so that they can check the sperm count. His sperm count is fine. He already knew this, he tells Belinda, because he got Laurel pregnant without even trying. This sets Belinda crying. She feels like a failure, she says. She feels like she’s less of a woman. With his own money, Deacon books a suite at the Four Seasons in Santa Barbara. He plies her with vodka martinis and gets to work.

Later that month, she gets her period.

Now he feels like a failure. But then, out of the blue, he gets a call from Luther Davey, owner of the TruBlue Entertainment Group, saying he wants to open tricoastal restaurants called Raindance, one in L.A., one in Chicago, one in New York, and he wants Deacon to be the executive chef of all three.

   
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