That night in bed, I made a decision. It was time we had a heart-to-heart about our pasts. I couldn’t take the chance of Brett finding out stuff about me from other people. Everywhere we went in this town, a skeleton could be waiting to jump out of the closet. Well, to be honest, it was only my closet. My great, big, walk-in closet. Brett probably had a small cupboard back in Texas filled with white cotton panties. Plus, there was so much gossip and rumormongering in our business. It was better if I gave it to him straight. There should be no secrets between us.

The heart-to-heart went like this:

“Brett, there’s some stuff I think I should tell you.”

“I don’t want to know.”

“But—”

“I said I don’t want to know.”

“But—”

“Trust me, Jackie, there are things people should just keep to themselves.”

INT. JACKIE AND BRETT’S HOUSE

BEVERLY HILLS

DAY

After wrapping the mercenary film, Brett immediately went into pre-production on another picture. I hung around the house trying to fill my days, while Penny sought “the perfect vehicle to showcase my talents”—talents I wasn’t at all sure I had. In my gigs thus far, not much had been demanded of me, and truthfully, I would have been content to keep it that way, but it was in Penny’s nature (possible owing to her childhood as a competitive gymnast), to keep raising the bar.

In the evenings at our publicist’s urging, Brett and I dutifully displayed ourselves on the red carpets of one or another premiere, smiling and posing under hot blinding Klieg lights, trying not to sweat on borrowed designer gowns and suits our stylists had procured. Afterward, we returned to our still unfurnished, six-thousand-square-foot home, a space destined to remain barren as long as Brett deemed decorators “frivolous” and I feared to might awaken my mother’s design curse.

Later in bed (a king mattress lacking a headboard), Brett would disappear into his script while I fidgeted and watched Letterman. Brett didn’t get Letterman’s humor any more than I got country-western music. Our upbringings, our beliefs, even our political views were different. My family were Dems, his were Republicans, though Brett insisted he was an Independent like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Bruce Willis, which in Hollywood meant Republican without the stigma.