by Ella Berman
Our flight landed in the late afternoon, and a black town car was waiting to take us straight to our hotel. The production company had booked us a suite at the Four Seasons, and I knew as soon as we arrived in the perfect, marble lobby that the new pair of Reebok shoes my parents had bought me were all wrong.
Everything in the hotel was a beautiful, rich cream color with gold accents and little touches we never even knew we were missing. My mom and I ran around our suite, calling each other over to feel the luxurious bathrobes hanging on the back of the door, or to touch the embroidered cover of the book of dreams tucked in the drawer next to the bed. My dad trailed behind us, already off-balance by the whole experience. The studio had left a giant hamper filled with American sweets on my bed, and my mom and I tore through Tootsie Rolls and Twinkies as we flicked through the TV movie channels. I felt mildly guilty that Esme wasn’t there to see any of it, but it was also the most attention I’d received from my parents in a long time. I hadn’t let myself realize how much I’d missed it.
I had three auditions over the next week, and each time I read the lines I felt more connected to them, as if they were bubbling up from a place inside me I never knew existed. I didn’t even care when the adults behind the table interrupted me to order Mexican food or whisper notes to the assistant standing with a clipboard behind them. I think my parents were worried that I already wanted it too much, but it never felt like a risk to me because I had a feeling the role was already mine.
Sure enough, the night before we were due to fly back to London, we were invited to dinner at Nobu with Able Yorke and his wife, Emilia, along with Nathan and Kit, the two men who would become my agent and manager. I had been introduced to all of them at various points over the week, but at the time I had lumped them all into the same category, filed only under “adults I need to impress.” As we walked into the dark restaurant, my mom reminded me that Able Yorke was the person I needed to win over the most.
Able was beautiful in the most obvious sense of the word, but I was beautiful, too, so I didn’t dwell on it other than to clock his two perfect dimples, just like mine. His wife was easier to overlook at first, less shimmering, less glamorous, except for her hair—creamy blond and thick, unlike anything I’d seen before. I could tell she was pregnant from the soft swell of her stomach underneath her cashmere sweater, and the way she instinctively touched her bump whenever she spoke.
My dad was wearing the same black suit with shoulder pads that he wore on his wedding day, and his trousers were bunched up over his Clarks shoes. As I watched him stab at the rolls of sushi and soft-shell crab with one chopstick, he seemed to belong to a different generation than the other men at the table, even though they were all around the same age. My mom wore a tight velvet dress that she had found in a thrift shop on Melrose earlier that week, and I went from feeling so proud of her beauty to mortally embarrassed as soon as I saw Emilia’s jeans and sweater, and the looks on the other diners’ faces as they stared at us. I didn’t know why or how, but I knew that my parents had gotten it wrong, and I couldn’t understand why they didn’t realize it too.
I held my breath as Able offered me the job right there at the table, even though, for some reason, he was looking at my parents when he said it. He spoke quietly, so that they had to move closer to hear him, and after a while I realized that he appeared to be convincing my parents to let me take the role, something I had assumed was a given since we had flown across the world for it. I watched as Able assured my parents that if we moved to Los Angeles to do the trilogy, I would be completely looked after, that my education would actually improve under world-class, private tuition. He said that he wasn’t just talking about this one project—he wanted me for longer. Able had identified the inevitable road bumps in the career of any young actor and was removing the variables. He wanted Marilyn without the overdose, Winona without the shoplifting, Gwyneth without the health shit. I wouldn’t waste my time or reputation on any trashy projects because I would work solely with Able. He would be my filter, my translator and my protector all in one. I wouldn’t go looking for any trouble because I would have everything I ever wanted given to me.
My parents listened in awe as Able laid out his plan, and, perhaps noting their implicit consent, Able subtly adjusted his rhetoric from the hypothetical to the concrete. The people around the table that night would perfect everything about me—my backstory; my classic, insouciant style; even my sarcastic interview manner—before my face ever appeared on a screen. They talked about changing my surname to Turner, evoking images of two Hollywood icons, Lana Turner and Grace Kelly yes, but also to separate my two identities so that I could always return to who I had been before. I would be reborn, and the best part of it was that it was a no-risk situation. There would be so many people watching over me, people personally invested in my career, that nothing could go wrong. I would have Able and Emilia to protect me in my parents’ absence. I would never make a sex tape or shave my head or be caught drunk driving, because I was in on the act: I had never really been Grace Turner at all.
I’d like to say I didn’t understand what I was agreeing to, but I think it would be a lie—even back then I knew I was giving a part of myself away. Only, sitting there that night, watching these glossy strangers talk about me as cool, buttery sashimi slick with soy sauce melted over my tongue, it just didn’t seem like the worst choice in the world. What I couldn’t have predicted was how people would want more and more of me; I didn’t yet know how closely praise is linked to punishment, how I would never again determine my own value because I wasn’t so much a person as an idea, shaped not only by the people around the table with me that night but by the millions of people who would pay to watch my movies in the years to come.
My mom behaved strangely at dinner, laughing loudly at the wrong moments and fluttering her eyes at Able like a marionette. Emilia smiled reassuringly at me whenever I looked at her, but I could tell she pitied me for my mother’s theatrics. I frowned at my mom and watched as my dad stared somewhere over my manager’s head for most of that first dinner, and all of the subsequent ones.
In the end, it didn’t matter anyway, because these strangers were all only tolerating my parents to get to me. I tried to be lively and entertaining whenever they spoke to me, and I told myself that I was doing it for all of us, to let these men know that we were in on the joke, when I gestured to my parents and apologized for bringing the Addams Family. The men erupted into laughter, Able whacking the table repeatedly even as he apologized to my dad, and Emilia allowing herself a small smile. My mom seemed confused at first, but then she joined in, grinning and laughing loudly along with them. I hated to see her make a fool of herself, but the men, who had been studying me closely since I arrived, were charmed, and that was what we had all dressed up for, wasn’t it? She’d been so excited all week, and I told myself that I could give all of this to her for the rest of her life if tonight just went well. I tried not to notice the growing patches of sweat underneath her armpits, or the way she kept licking her lips before she spoke.
The more she drank, the more revealing her stories became. We were all used to her being the heartbeat of any group, but it turned out she didn’t know anything about this new world I was joining, and she told embarrassing stories that always circled back to her modeling career. At one point she described in excruciating detail exactly how her career had been hindered when she married my dad instead of moving to Los Angeles as a teenager herself. Able listened patiently and asked the right questions about my dad’s construction company, but even then I realized that he was just handling them both. For the first time I saw my parents through someone else’s eyes and felt embarrassed for them. I interrupted them both after that, cutting across their stories, and in doing so I understood implicitly that I was giving the men permission to do the same. My mom stopped talking as much, and I tried not to see the disappointment in my dad’s eyes. After a while, it just became easie
r not to look at either of them.
My parents’ role in the plan was laid out from the start. All they needed to do was create a loving and stable home environment for me to return to, and since their role was to treat me like a regular kid, it was better that I didn’t associate them with work in any way, or vice versa. As soon as the visas were sorted, my family obediently scuttled away to their new home. Anaheim was the only place in America we’d ever visited as a family, and I guess my parents liked the convenience of being so close to Disneyland or something. Or maybe it was the relentless sunshine and right-wing politics. I don’t know, I have no idea why they chose Anaheim, but I’d rarely slept more than five nights in a row at their house until last year. From that first movie on, my mom and I fought like rabid dogs, or like two people more similar than they would ever admit. As far as I knew, my mother never tried to find modeling work in California, and they certainly didn’t make any effort to find new friends. I never knew if she was bored, lonely, envious or a combination of all three, and I didn’t hang around to find out. Of course I understand that I was the one who’d left them behind, but I also understood that they’d let me. By the age of fifteen, I was more used to being alone on a movie set than with my family, in theory watched after by a guardian, but in reality tethered to absolutely nothing at all.
I tried to keep in touch with Esme, sending her gifts when I remembered, but soon after moving to Anaheim she applied to a boarding school for gifted children, and she gradually turned into just another person around whom I had to play a part, only this time I was pretending that I was still her big sister.
Able was the writer and director of that first movie, and every movie I made after that, except for one disastrous horror movie that was sold to me as the new Scream. It was supposed to set me free but it tanked, and, under the advice of my agent, my manager, my parents and basically every single person that I met in the street, I ended up back with Able. My fate was more sealed than ever before—I was his muse and he was my Svengali. His work was at its most brilliant when I was in it, and, for my part, I glowed on-screen like nobody else around me. The other two assassins faded into adolescent obscurity after the second film, but not me. I was untouchable, unstoppable, hurtling down a path to immortality so rapidly, so immaculately, that not one person stopped to question how it all worked so well, a fortysomething man and a teenager being so inextricably linked.
CHAPTER NINE
I arrive back in LA as the sun is rising. It’s easy to forget the things you loved about a city that has ruined you, but I always liked this one small window of time when Los Angeles just looks like any other city in the world. It happens only once the streetlights have stopped twinkling in the dark, but before the golden sun begins to light the city like a movie set. It was the only time of day that LA ever felt like home to me.
I pull up outside the glass house in Venice. I don’t have the key anymore, so I ring the bell. There is a cactus next to the door that I don’t remember being there before. I reach out and touch it, but it’s softer than I thought it would be, and my fingernail leaves a wet, crescent-shaped mark.
My husband opens the door wearing a white T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts. It’s what he wears to bed every single night, and he somehow looks both exactly the same and entirely different from how I remembered. I try not to think about when we first met, when we were just two teenagers staying up all night in his apartment in Los Feliz, drinking tequila as we talked about all the people we’d left behind to be there. For me it meant leaving my parents and sister who had moved across the world for me, and for him it was leaving a close-knit family in a town where fireflies lit up the sky and people kept guns in their glove compartments. When he had to leave the room to throw up from the tequila, I slipped quietly out the front door, leaving a note in my place that read you’re perfect in lowercase, drunk letters that didn’t touch each other at all.
“Shit, Grace,” he says, trying to look at me before he has to turn away. He already looks lost. When I was away, I only ever pictured him smiling, his bronze eyes crinkling at the corners like linen in summer, but now I remember this face too. I follow him into the house.
“Welcome home, I guess,” he says, and we both know that the house is mine only in the legal sense. It even smells like him, slightly sour and woody. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I see that Dylan already has a Christmas tree up too, and that it’s not even the kind an interior designer puts up for you. It’s decorated with hundreds of swinging multicolored baubles and paper cut into crude animal shapes with lollipop sticks for tails. Nothing matches.
“You’re a little early with the tree,” I say, peering past him. “Did you get a wood burner put in?”
A woman with long dark hair and freckles is sitting on the sofa in plaid pajamas, holding a mug of coffee with her legs curled up underneath her. I can tell instantly that she is better than me from the way her entire face lights up when she smiles at me, and from how quickly it happened, as if her default setting is only ever .3 seconds away from elation. I don’t feel sad when I realize this, just a strange, muted relief that in some way, my expectations have finally been met.
“Where’s Doina?” I ask, looking between the woman on the sofa and Dylan. Doina was our housekeeper.
“She’s gone, Grace,” Dylan says, shrugging. “You should have called.”
“Now or a year ago?” I try to make a joke, but it turns out I still have the ability to hurt him, because he flinches.
“I’m exhausted,” I say, staring upstairs in the direction of the bedrooms longingly.
“It’s the morning,” Dylan says slowly.
“I’m Grace,” I call past him to the woman on the sofa.
“I know! I’m Wren. It’s great to meet you.”
“She seems lovely,” I say, to nobody in particular, and then I walk upstairs to the master bedroom because I know that Dylan won’t have slept in there once since I’ve been gone.
The room is lifeless, untouched. When I turn the main light on, dust particles spin in the air around me. I pick up a framed photo from our wedding day that still sits on the bedside table, wanting to recognize myself in it. We got married in Big Sur in January, the night I turned twenty-one, and during the ceremony I gripped my bouquet so tightly that I pricked my finger and it bled onto my white jumpsuit. I could taste metal for the rest of the night, but it didn’t matter because I read a poem by Richard Brautigan to my new husband while people held sparklers shaped like hearts, and for the first time I saw myself as everyone else saw me.
I left within the year.
CHAPTER TEN
I spend my first morning back in LA drifting in and out of sleep, waking eventually to the sound of someone tapping lightly on my bedroom door. My mouth feels dry and tacky, and I can smell my own sweat on the sheets. The sun is right above us and all I see is the blue, blue Pacific Ocean through the floor-to-ceiling windows. I remember how I once thought that being close to the water made me feel as if I could breathe again, but now I find myself missing the flat suburban sprawl of Anaheim, the sanitized public spaces and the flags floating lightly in the wind. I feel exposed being back in LA, and I wonder what it would be like to actually know how I feel about something before I’ve already lost it.
The door opens gently, scraping across the top of the carpet, and I grab the tube of pills from the bedside table, shoving them underneath my pillow. Dylan stands at the foot of my bed, looking anywhere in the room but at me. His eyes eventually settle on the movie poster for Breathless hanging on the wall above my head.
“I called Laurel. She’s downstairs waiting for you.”
“Why? You hate Laurel.” Laurel was my sometime friend, sometime assistant, always outrageously ineffective sober companion.
“I don’t like Laurel, but you don’t seem like yourself,” he says slowly.
“You haven’t seen me for a year, remember
? This is what I’m like.” I pull at my shoulder-length hair with the greasy dark roots and the blond ends.
“I’m not talking about your hair.”
“Do you like it? Stripper chic, n’est-ce pas?”
Dylan exhales exasperatedly. At its best our relationship was based on me saying and doing stupid shit to make Dylan laugh, but I understand that what I did to him means that I have lost the right to that too.
“Sorry. Laurel. Please can you tell her to go away? I’ll call her later.”
“All right, but what meds are you on?”
I shake my head.
“Drug- and alcohol-free since the day I left LA.”
It’s almost the truth, but it just makes Dylan look more disoriented than ever.
“What’s up with you then?”
I stare down at my hand, turning it over and realizing that Dylan will notice I’m not wearing my ring. I don’t know if I need to feel bad about that or whether it would be stranger if I were still pretending. I tuck my hand back underneath the duvet anyway.
“I’m still getting used to being myself.”
* * *
• • •
I stay in bed for another hour, watching how the sun glitters on the surface of the water and trying to feel anything other than numb about that and everything else in my life. You know those days when you’re soaring and every single thing you touch is so immensely, undeniably perfect, and the best part is that you made it like that all by yourself, just by being so shining and lucky and brilliant? Well, those days don’t exist when you’re not on drugs. They’re no longer an option. And that may have worked out when I was with my parents in Anaheim, where life drifts slowly along a baseline, but I understand that people in LA are going to want something from me that I don’t know how to give them. They’re going to want an explanation, a reckoning or, best of all, some Hollywood sign of an emotional breakthrough. I have none of the above. Time stood still while I was in Anaheim, and maybe that was why I chose to go there; I always knew that I could walk for miles each day and still end up back at the exact same spot.
