Fame Read Online Free PDF Page B

well. For months she holed up at home in LA, refusing to attend any auditions or give a single interview about her shock departure from Rumors. Meanwhile, of course, Dorian’s career was taking off in spectacular style, a success for which Chrissie could never quite forgive him.
    After fifteen years, Dorian still spoke loyally in interviews about his ‘stunning, talented wife’, and was famously immune to the manifold temptations of Hollywood. His fidelity was considered all the more admirable in industry circles since for years it appeared that his wife refused to have his children. Most people viewed this as the height of selfishness on Chrissie’s part. In fact, her unwillingness to become a mother mirrored her refusal to go to auditions, or to take any of the leading roles that Dorian offered her gift-wrapped in all of his movies. She was afraid. Trapped by her own insecurities in the wildly luxurious life Dorian had built for her, she complained ceaselessly about LA, how shallow it was and how being a famous director’s wife made her feel empty and invisible.
    Then, four years ago, three things happened. The first was that Dorian found out his wife was having an affair, with the leading man in one of his movies. The liaison was actually the latest in a string of extramarital adventures that Chrissie had used over the years to prop up her fragile self-esteem. But it was the first one that Dorian knew about, and he was utterly devastated by it. The second thing was that, at long last, Chrissie agreed to get pregnant and conceived Saskia, the Band-Aid baby that both she and Dorian hoped would repair their marriage. And the third thing was that the Romanian government contacted Dorian out of the blue, to tell him that they had begun the process of restoring pre-revolutionary property to its rightful owners. Would Dorian like to return ‘home’ to claim his inheritance, the Rasmirezes’ historic Transylvanian Schloss, complete with all its priceless treasures?
    At the time, Romania had seemed like a lifeline, the fresh start that he and Chrissie so badly needed. Chrissie had cheated on him because she was unhappy in LA and felt like a failure there. Dorian believed in marriage. His parents had managed it for the better part of fifty years under far more difficult circumstances. He owed it to Chrissie and to himself to try to repair the damage. Here was a chance to take Chrissie and their newborn daughter as far from the Hollywood madness as it was possible to go. Dorian would sweep Chrissie up on his white charger and install her as queen in his fairytale castle. Little Saskia would grow up as a princess. And they would all live happily ever after.
    Or not.
    If he were completely honest with himself (not always Dorian’s strongest suit), becoming a father had not been the seismic, emotionally transformative event that he’d expected. The baby was sweet enough. But, after waiting so long for parenthood, Dorian began to realize that the idea of having a child was considerably more intoxicating than the exhausting, often deathly dull reality. He also realized, not without a sense of shame, that a part of him was disappointed that Saskia had not been born a boy.
    For her part, Chrissie also revelled in the idea of motherhood or, more specifically, the idea of herself as the perfect mother: devoted, selfless, instinctively maternal. It was a self-image Chrissie clung to doggedly as Saskia grew older, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and one that she demanded her husband validate by praising her mothering skills at every possible opportunity. But the truth was that, like Dorian, Chrissie Rasmirez found young children boring and her own daughter was no exception. By now a semi-professional martyr in her marriage (Chrissie had long ago convinced herself she had sacrificed her career for Dorian, and not on an altar of her own fear), her new role as tireless carer to a demanding toddler added another arrow of