Little Known Facts: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

an autograph. His father signs what looks like a newspaper for two college students. Elise signs the same newspaper and smiles at the two boys in their oversize LSU T-shirts. Will feels his heartbeat accelerate, not sure if he should go out and try to insinuate himself into their plans, pretend to his father that he is not particularly impressed by the fact that Elise appears to have fallen for him. He could go out to the street and say that he only wants to give him back his phone, Fran having at last been contacted, and wait to see if Elise invites him along.
    Despite his desire to be near her, he doesn’t want to be a hanger-on. He lets them walk out of view and hesitates for several seconds near the doors before he follows them into the humid night. But once in the street, he doesn’t see them. A taxi has spirited them away, or they have disappeared through a nearby door and entered a room filled with people who will remember their sighting of the two movie stars for years. If he were to join them at their table, no one would really notice him. He would feel as incidental as the salt and pepper shakers, part of the scenery and not even an important part.
    He knows that he could do anything he wants to with his life. If he wanted to study oceanography or take photographs of gazelles in the Serengeti, no one would tell him that he should find a more practical career, one that would enable him to pay his bills and support the family he would surely want one day. Isn’t he lucky to have so much? He should be happy, they would say. In fact, he should be ecstatic.

Chapter 2
Flattering Light
    Because she does not want to be unkind, even when provoked, she will never admit that she was initially attracted to him because of his father. The two men look enough alike that for the first few weeks she dated Will, it felt as if she were with the famous man rather than his undistinguished son. She knows that Will suspects this fact; he has teased her about how he is sure that she wishes the actor rather than his boring son were offering to take her to San Francisco for a long weekend, or to Rome or Rio or Montreal, wherever it is she wants to go. They can travel anywhere she would like to because he can give her many of the same things his father can. He isn’t famous, but he is young and has money, although he isn’t the person who earned most of it. He also has time, which his famous father generally does not.
    Danielle met Will through a friend who went to high school with him in Pasadena, the city where his mother moved them after she and Will’s father divorced. Renn Ivins kept the house in the Hollywood Hills and still lives in it, though he has since married and divorced a second woman, one who moved to Big Sur with her divorce settlement and alcoholism, an affliction she has publicly blamed Renn for. Despite the cheapness of the gossipy industries that surround the truly famous, Danielle finds these mean-spirited declarations fascinating and knows that many people do. Will has told her more than once that if he had fewer scruples, he could make quite a lot of money disclosing to gossip columnists details about his father’s personal life. He wouldn’t have to work at all if he were willing to play the double agent.
    He doesn’t have to work anyway, a fact she doesn’t remind him of because it upsets him. He also isn’t privy to many of the details of his father’s private life because after thirty years of working in the California film industry, Renn Ivins is skilled at avoiding the more lurid of the spotlights. He confides in very few people, with Will’s sister Anna among these confidants more often than Will is. The three times Danielle has seen Renn in the fifteen months that she and Will have been dating, he impressed her with his kindness and sense of humor and how politely he treated the servers at the restaurants where they met for dinner. In her most honest moments, she knows that the accusations Will