but I also know that I wasn’t good at being clear about anything that I wanted with Harrison. I could charm the birds out of everyone’s trees but his. That’s something I wrote in the diaries that I kept during the filming of Star Wars. The first one, Episode IV. The diaries I found recently while expanding my bedroom at home. I was going through the many boxes that were stored romantically beneath the floorboards and came across three written notebooks I had kept during that epic time—and then promptly forgot I’d kept. Or that they kept me, in some ways, sane. When I read them, I was struck by how unusual they were, which is when I first considered publishing them. (I still might. What do you think?)
There were two reasons that I wrote the diaries, the first one being that I’d always written, since I was about twelve. It seemed to calm me, getting anything that might be chaotic behind the eyes onto the page in front of me where it could do me less harm. Along the lines of the saying, “Better out than in,” though that refers to vomit. Maybe more like, “Better an empty house than an unhappy tenant.” Not that writing on my notepads managed to actually empty my mind—though some would argue—but I was grateful to relieve the overflow.
The second reason I wrote them was that I couldn’t talk to Harrison. Basically about anything, but especially about the entity that was “us”—not that there actually was such a thing. Not only couldn’t I converse with Harrison, but given that my weekends with Harrison were a secret, it became something that was better left unsaid, to discuss, only with my pen in hand, with the journal in front of me. I felt that I couldn’t confide in anyone else what was happening with Harrison, because Harrison was married. And not to me.
So it might get awkward if I told a person about us, because then that person might tell someone else, and that person would tell another person until eventually Harrison’s wife might hear about it and react other than positively about it in the extreme. And nobody wanted that. Not that Harrison and I had ever discussed not wanting it. It was an understood not-wanting.
I think that might be an overall understanding one arrives at, either verbally or otherwise, when you’re having an affair with someone who is unaccountably a married person, unless perhaps the wedded individual tells you that his wife doesn’t understand him, which is why he wants to leave her to be with you. Or, in this instance, me. And no one was telling anyone that they felt misunderstood and as such there wouldn’t be anything leaving-wise in this instance. So that was that.
I only know about the understandings you have with married men and such from movies or books. Never had an affair with a married man, that was me. I’d barely had understandings with a single man. And I’ve never been with someone wedded since. As I may have mentioned, I had really only had a relationship of any sort with one human being prior to my being with Harrison.
But Harrison didn’t know that right away. All he knew was . . . essentially nothing prior to our initial weekend of untold romance and unforgettable passion. I mean, you know, general stuff that you write on forms. Name. Parents. Siblings. Friends. Schools. Plus, anecdotes intended no doubt to hold me up to a good light. Amusing stories! How fun I was! How easygoing and irresistible was I?
What I didn’t know was that Harrison may have been listening to me. To what I said. Specifically, about men. Listening for anything confirming that I was an available and experienced gal! He could have been gathering these rosebuds in order to come to the conclusion that he might have wanted to come to. Or, the one he ultimately came to anyway. The conclusion that it would be okay to take me home with him, or take me to my house with him. And that was that.
? ? ?
all through the Star Wars workweek I waited in vain for some indication that (a) we had ever been together at all (or had I imagined the entire event?) and/or (b) if indeed it had occurred, would it ever occur again in any form, ranging from another inarticulate weekend to finally marrying (after a discreet amount of time had elapsed since his eventual and uncomplicated divorce). I’m sure that on our relative lists of priorities as we went about filming, I might have ranked as high as number fifteen on his agenda, while Harrison was my number one. So this was the way I made it from that first weekend to that second. Would we share another monosyllabic weekend, or would I spend the ensuing Saturday and Sunday virtually alone, wondering what I’d done to already push him away? How could I have when we had barely been that close, just close enough to ignite an almost full-on obsession in me?
But spend a second weekend we did. Once again we were together in our apart way. We met at the North Star Pub in St. John’s Wood, between Elstree and central London.
I’m sure I selected the place because it was the pub I had gone to when I was at drama college all those months ago. Months from when I’d dropped out of drama college in order to star in a space fantasy called Star Wars. Which must’ve seemed like decades before that evening at the North Star, because essentially everything in my life had changed. I was no longer a drama student doing Shakespeare and Ibsen with a fellow-student boyfriend; I was now an actual actress with a job in a film that took place in a galaxy far, far away. A space fantasy. Perfect. And now I was having an affair with my costar from that film. Just like I pretended to want, without understanding what that meant, and here I was in a pub in London having a drink with him after a day of filming.
I believe I may have previously mentioned that Harrison was not a garrulous person. Given that, as we sat in the public house, I inadvertently held my breath quite a bit—a lot—while fretting over what I would and would not say during that evening. I knew without believing it that I would not say a charmingly helluva lot. I would be calm and succinct and ask thoughtful questions and then listen to his answers intently. Had I been able to manifest the demeanor just described, this would have been the night he discovered yet another of my many characteristics that would cause him to rethink any less than positive opinions he had—obviously prematurely—formed.
He would wonder where I had been all his life and then recall with a bemused, ironic sinking feeling that I had yet to be born for much of it. The important thing was that at least he’d met me now. He would remind himself to try to make up for all of our lost time for the rest of our compatible lives. But for now we didn’t think about ever needing to make up for anything, as we had barely amassed any amount of time together at all.
In fact, what happened was Harrison and I both began to drink and at some point early on I said, “Do you want to see me do an imitation of you?”
Harrison didn’t really walk, he swaggered, moving a bit like John Wayne in slow motion—he would take his seemingly bad attitude for a walk. In order to depict this, I moved out of sight around the corner from Harrison and after a moment reappeared, strolling as he strolled, sauntering my way into whatever fresh hell I found myself in. I’d become him, disenchanted Lord Ford, master of all he surveyed, if he got around to it. I studied my environment with bored disenchanted eyes and smirking mouth, behaving as if wherever I’d inadvertently found myself was no doubt some pathetic watering hellhole for a bunch of needy poseurs and poseur wannabes who unfortunately didn’t have the stuff to interest me/him.
I hadn’t looked at Harrison yet to see how my portrayal of him was going over—too busy appearing indifferent and impatient with my surroundings. I’d get around to him in good time. Until then, what criminally inept person had decorated this room I was in? Decorated? More like defiled! Wow. I was amazed my eyes weren’t bleeding from the insult some referred to as interior—shouldn’t that be inferior?—decoration.