Movie Star By Lizzie Pepper by Hilary Liftin Page B

respond? Well, if I’d thought about it, I would have assumed that everyone would recognize the love that connected us.
    And so it was awful when the world decided that what they were seeing was the exact opposite.
    So much for countering the negative response to our Cannes debut. Instead, the press was brutal. Poor Rob, he bore the brunt of it. People didn’t believe it was a spontaneous act of love. They called him a manufactured brand, a robot attempting to play the role of a man in love. The YouTube meme, the talk show sketches, the political cartoon showing the president sitting on a car while the House speaker sings to him. For the life of me, I could not see what they thought was so bizarre. Rob shrugged it off. “We can’t win,” he said. “Next week they’ll love us again.”
    Needless to say, my father, who called us the very next day, was apoplectic. He raged at Rob, who stayed on the phone with him, serious andfocused, saying, “Yes, sir,” every so often until my father had exhausted himself. Not the best first impression a boyfriend’s ever given my dad, but (thanks to Johnny) far from the worst. Afterward, Rob told me that, with all due respect, my father would forget it as quickly as everyone else.
    “Ha,” I said. “You don’t know my father.”
    As I’ve said, Rob has pretty thick skin. But I don’t. Having people be so merciless toward us, something changed in me. One night I was sitting at the kitchen counter with my laptop, reading the comments on a particularly scathing
Glam
piece (“Lizzie Pepper Drops Name and Personality”), when Rob came up to me, closed the laptop, and took it to the study.
    “Hey!” I followed him. Sure, it was a waste of time, but that didn’t mean I wanted him to confiscate my computer like I was a naughty child.
    “It’s enough,” Rob said. “As soon as you let go, you’ll realize how little it matters.” He took my hand and kissed every finger. As he did, he spoke, saying one word between each kiss, “I have you. You have me. Our love is everything.”
    That was the moment of decision for me. I had watched carefully as Rob rode out every aspect of the debacle with aplomb. He was so inscrutable. He seemed above it all, immune to public opinion, free of any self-doubt. At times he really did seem like the too-perfect robot the vicious press had labeled him.
Was
he for real? It was time for me to make up my mind. Would I trust this man? Would I take him at face value? Was his calm reserve an empty shell, as the media would have it, or was it really possible that this wasn’t all an act, that he was the same strong, confident prince all the way to the core?
    I chose to have faith in Rob. While the rest of society was full of mean-spirited judgment, Rob just kept right on loving me. In my prior relationships, I’d been the stable one, the rational one, the decision maker. Compared to Rob, I was the inexperienced child who had so much to learn. It felt like a load off my shoulders.
    His certainty anchored me, and yet he wasn’t too good to be true. Rob wasn’t a perfect lover, smooth and cinematic. He was sweaty and trembling and questioning and vulnerable. There was a deeper Rob, I needed to believe, one he still hadn’t let me fully see. I caught glimpses of it in our most intimate moments. Our bed felt like a little boat on a stormy sea, where it was us against the elements. If we had to cling to our vessel, isolating ourselves from public opinion and judgment, waiting for a change in tides, or charting a course to foreign lands, so be it.
    “You’re right,” I said. “We don’t need Hollywood. We make a perfect universe of two.”
    The next weekend, I moved in with Rob.

6
    T he only work I had managed to line up for the summer was an appearance on
Apartment 3J
. Guest-starring on such a popular sitcom was a stopgap. It was taking far too long for me to get a movie, and meanwhile the media was trashing me. A guest appearance would bolster my