by Ella Berman
“I’m figuring it out,” I say, ignoring her.
“You don’t get to choose when to be normal. Don’t you realize that?” Laurel says, shaking her head. “That was the deal.”
I watch over Laurel’s shoulder as a woman in a Lakers T-shirt asks a man at the table next to her something about me. He shrugs, embarrassed when he catches me watching. I reflexively peel my lips back into a smile.
“I’ll message you the link to the Nicaragua story,” Laurel says. “And you can tell me how you want to respond.”
“I still don’t—”
“You still don’t have a phone. Of course you don’t, you little freak,” she says almost affectionately. “Okay, I’ll print it off for you and give it to you next time I see you, or maybe I’ll transcribe it and train a carrier pigeon to drop it off to you, since there seems to be no urgency whatsoever on your part to read it anyway . . .”
Our server places my egg sandwich down in front of me and I watch as Laurel pulls out another phone, this one black.
“Why do you have two phones?” I ask as I chew a mouthful of bread and egg dripping in harissa mayo.
“I have one for play and one for work.”
“What . . . what’s your exact job at the moment?”
“I’m a life coach. I specialize in pivoting career goals so that they reflect your strengths,” Laurel says, completely seriously.
“Have you ever had a career, other than being a career adviser?”
“Of course I have,” she says, making a face like I’m an idiot. “You.”
After that I finish my sandwich in peace because Laurel seems to have forgotten I’m here, rapidly firing off some emails and texts instead. Despite the glass of rosé, she does seem to have got her shit together since I last saw her.
The soft egg yolk drips down my fingers, and I lick each one before cleaning myself up with my napkin. Laurel is eyeing me with disgust.
“Don’t be mad just because you haven’t eaten a meal in ten years,” I say, and she starts to laugh.
“There she is.”
I smile at her, but I’m already bored of our sparring and bored of the couple next to us who are taking photos of me when they think I’m not looking, and bored of this lunch but also bored of anything else I could be doing instead.
“So, this house thing,” Laurel says, watching me closely now. “I’ve pulled some options together for you. Two of them are near me in Silver Lake, and two of them are on the beach. I know you want to be away from Dylan and what’s-her-bitch, but you can’t let them drive you out of the entire Westside.”
“Wren. She’s actually a delight.”
“What happened to you at home? Are your parents loving or something?” Laurel asks, and I forgot that she could occasionally make me laugh.
“Something like that. Let me see the beach houses.”
I wait as she pulls them up. There are certain things that nobody teaches you when you have people who are paid to do everything for you. How to be alone is one, and doing anything useful online is another. Or at least it was for me. My agent and manager picked up on the fact that I’d never been allowed a smartphone as a kid, and decided to project an image of me as an extinct species in the age of the overshare—a millennial without a social media presence. No hawking of detox teas or dating apps for me. Instead, they curated a portrait of a reluctant young indie actress trying to live a normal life in Venice with her talented documentary-filmmaker husband. Much was made of the fact that I used a flip phone and had never posted a selfie anywhere. In reality, my movies were never real indies and I was never really cool, but that didn’t seem to matter. Working with Able was supposed to give me the exposure I needed, without having to force myself on the public in other ways to stay relevant. It was a luxury I always knew I was lucky to have, despite everything else that came with it.
I had two carefully chosen brand partnerships—one with a French fashion house and one with a company who made instant film, and I walked in fashion shows in Paris and London only if I knew the designers and they asked me. Other than that, self-promotion was kept to a minimum. As planned with my team, I went to my own movie premieres and showed up at awards shows if something I was in was nominated, but I made sure to seem as uncomfortable as I could (without appearing ungrateful) about having to do either. It helped that Dylan wasn’t famous in the same way I was, so we were left alone by the press most of the time. We didn’t go to any of the new clubs or restaurant openings in Malibu or West Hollywood, and I was never photographed on a yacht in a bikini or at a certain pop star’s New Year’s Eve party. All of my bad behavior was carried out behind the closed doors of private residences in Venice and the Hollywood Hills, and, as a result, I was exempt from much of the tabloid mauling my peers experienced. I was on another planet to them all, and even though it hadn’t been my idea, I thought I liked it that way.
“So even though Venice is almost over, I’ve found one place. It’s beautiful, and the security system is next-level shit. Some Russian oligarch lived there before he disappeared.” Laurel shows me her phone. The house is angular, imposing, heavy on the cement.
“That used to be a drug dealer’s house,” I say, shaking my head.
“You’re right. Bad vibes. And we should know. Lol.” I forgot that Laurel occasionally says LOL out loud.
“Okay, so this one could work, but it’s a weird location. It’s right next to that mobile home community in Malibu. Do you know which one I mean? I think the guy who played James Bond moved there when he had that B12 deficiency and lost his mind.”
The house is a Cape Cod–style bungalow with white clapboard and navy shutters, and a small white porch with three steps down onto the sand. I scan the information below the photographs.
“Coyote Sumac?” I ask, trying to keep my voice level.
“Yeah. I once woke up at a house there, and the guy actually had a glow-in-the-dark mural painted on his bedroom walls. He was a grown man. Creepy as hell. The houses are right on the beach though. I think it started as a cult in the eighties, and Malibu developers are still so pissed because it’s the most prime real estate, but it’s just full of burnouts smoking weed and surfing every day and, worse than that, talking about smoking weed and surfing every day.” I hand Laurel her phone back and she shakes her head. “You’re right. You don’t need that shit. And there isn’t a single photo of the interior, so it’s probably a sex dungeon inside.”
I know exactly where the Coyote Sumac community is, I just didn’t know the name of it until now. Three years earlier, at my lowest point ever, I had looked down on the perfect, wisteria-framed houses and wished more than anything in the world that I was hidden safely inside one of them. I try to focus on the next house Laurel shows me, but when she talks, each word floats into my ears like a sound I’ve never heard before.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The day before I’m supposed to move into a house on Laurel’s street in Silver Lake, a woman turns up on the doorstep of the glass house. She rings the bell in the late afternoon, wearing a navy silk wrap dress and pumps, her dark hair pulled back, no jewelry, no makeup.
Dylan is on his way out when she arrives, and he finds me standing by the door in my old white bathrobe, staring at the security monitor. We watch her on the screen for a moment, shoulder touching shoulder for the first time in over a year.
“Want me to tell her to fuck off?” he asks.
“Do you know who she is?”
“Nah, she looks like a reporter though.”
“I’ll speak to her.”
I open the door and Dylan slips out, tapping the side of his head at her as he does. The woman nods at him briefly and waits for him to pass before she turns back to me.
“My name is Camila Amri. I’m working on a story for Vanity Fair that I think you could be interested in.”
I turn around, leavin
g her on the doorstep with the door wide open.
She follows me through to the living room, every step hammering a small mark in the wooden floor. She carries herself in the way that people who were overweight as children do—as if they can’t quite get used to their impossible lightness.
I sit on the sofa, peeling my feet out from the sticky Japanese slippers I’m wearing, and tucking them underneath me. Camila sits opposite me on the green velvet armchair that appeared in the living room one day, around the same time all the expensive art was hung on the walls. People were always scuttling around me and rearranging things, but I never thought it was weird because it just felt like another movie set.
“I like your Christmas tree. It’s very . . . authentic.”
“Thanks. The decorations were made by real-life, authentic kids.”
I watch Camila as she works out what to say next. The Christmas tree has thrown her.
“Aren’t you supposed to speak to my publicist before you turn up on my doorstep? Or my manager?”
“Do you still have either?”
“I’m not sure.”
“I’m not going to lie to you. If we do this right, it could be huge for us both,” Camila says, but she’s frowning now because this already isn’t going as planned. I keep my face neutral and maintain eye contact, which unnerves her even more.
“Why did you leave LA?” she asks, shifting in her seat.
“Aren’t you supposed to be a rising star in journalism?” I ask as she wipes her palms on her dress, leaving a damp pattern on the silk.
“I don’t understand the question.”
“You just asked me the same question the guy at the gas station asked me yesterday.”
“You know I have to ask it,” she says quietly. She rearranges her hands in her lap, and her cheeks are flushed.
“Did you used to be fat?” I ask, and because I’m almost fat now, I sort of think I can get away with it.
“Have you done all of this so that you won’t be objectified anymore?” she says quickly, pointing at my lap, and I look down. My bathrobe has creased and is exposing the soft, white part of my stomach and my beige underwear thick with pubic hair.
“I’m sorry,” she says, holding out her hands, and I can see that I’ve bullied her into being vicious.
“Women apologize too much,” I say.
“Grace. I think you know what I’m about to ask you. Do you want to tell me about Able Yorke?”
I fold my hands in my lap and lean toward her, my chest constricting and exploding at the same time. My breath comes short and fast, out, out, out like a horse in labor. I know what she wants from me, but I can’t give it to her because the story isn’t going to be what she thinks it is. It never is.
“Get out of my house.”
* * *
• • •
After she’s gone, I lock the door and slump against it, pulling my robe tight around me like a blanket. My stomach is knotted, the blood still ringing in my ears when a strange sensation starts to thread its way through the panic. Somehow, this stranger has identified something in me that nobody else could, something that is as much a part of me as my childhood, my marriage, any work I’ve ever done, but that I’ve kept hidden in the loneliest depths of my mind since it happened. Even though I know that I will never be able to tell her my story, with all of the nuances, the gray areas I take up, for some reason just the recognition that something may have been wrong, even if it’s just a hunch, even if she forgets about it tomorrow, is making me aware that I exist. And not ten years ago, or even five, but right fucking now.
For the first time in a while, I sleep through the night. In the morning I call Laurel to tell her I’ve changed my mind. I want to take the house by the ocean after all.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
On the set of the movie, there were three of us, three teen assassins with exactly the same job, but it was obvious to everyone that I was his favorite, his project. Able’s beloved grandmother had been British, and he would bring English delicacies to the set especially for me. Once we had a tea party in his trailer with a hamper filled with buttery shortbread and exotic teas he’d had delivered from Fortnum & Mason. The biscuit tin was shaped like a carousel and played tinny circus music while we ate. Able was the most engaging adult I’d ever met, and I idolized him from the moment we started working together. I knew I could do anything he asked because his belief in me made me feel untouchable.
I learned quickly that Able was also tough, resourceful and single-minded, and that nobody could match his extraordinary talent and influence in the industry. He had been an actor before he became a director, and his own history was stranger than fiction, closer to the mythical American dream than any of the films he has directed. As the legend goes, Able was born to a teenage heroin addict in Kansas and spent two weeks on the streets with her before he was adopted by her mother. He moved with his grandmother to Salt Lake City, where he was the sole focus of her love, encouragement and pious affection until his eighth birthday, when she died suddenly of pneumonia. Two months after her death, Able was discovered living alone in the derelict basement of the church she attended, and was placed into foster care until he was discovered again at the age of twelve, this time by a model scout who spotted his teardrop dimples and glittering eyes at a carwash in a town called Lark.
From his first modeling job, Able worked like someone who had promised himself he would never have to eat rats for lunch again. His story became legendary and his face more famous than many of the actors he cast in his films. He was adored by the media and moviegoers alike. When I started working with him, he was already rich in everything that was valued in a man, his beauty only serving to soften the blow of his temper on set. I watched intelligent, powerful women melt at his feet every day, and even though nobody really knew how much of his backstory was real, I realized early on that it didn’t seem to matter.
One morning, around halfway through the three-month shoot of that first movie, Able pulled me aside to tell me he wanted me to do one of the stunts myself. Up until that point we had all been using stunt doubles, but Able decided he needed a continuous shot of my face in this particular scene to make it work. Able had made his name shooting gritty, character-driven projects, so this adaptation was a big departure for him, and he often seemed visibly frustrated with the limitations the genre placed on him.
The scene in question showed my character fighting a bomb maker in a New York City apartment, culminating with me being pushed backward off a fire escape. The stunt wasn’t advanced—all I needed to do was fall out of a first-story fire escape onto a crash pad below; the problem was that I had been acutely phobic of heights for as long as I could remember. Still, when Able asked, I nodded and listened closely all morning as the stunt coordinator fitted me with pads underneath my costume and taught me how to land the “suicide” fall: on my back, with flat feet, bent knees, and my arms stretched out to the sides at a forty-five-degree angle, making sure to exhale heavily on impact. Once I had perfected the fall on the pit mat, I obediently climbed up the fire escape.
Once I was at the top, I gripped the railing with hands already slick with sweat as Able called action from below. I stood on the edge of the fire escape, swaying slightly as multiple cameras swooped menacingly around me. The man playing my adversary paused to ask if I was okay, but it sounded like he was speaking to me through a crashing waterfall. Panic waded through my veins as I sank down to sit on the platform, resting my head on my knees. My ears were ringing as somewhere below, in another world, I heard Able shout, “Cut!” The stunt coordinator made a move to help me down, but Able put his hand out to stop him.
The climb back down the fire escape to the back lot was the most excruciating moment of my life to date. Each step felt like it took five minutes. By the time I reached the bottom, I was trembling all over, and nobody on set would meet my eye. They knew I was A
ble’s problem because that’s how our relationship had worked up until then—I had made it clear that I didn’t need anyone else. Able called lunch, and the crew dispersed, muttering clichés about never working with animals or children. They knew they didn’t owe me anything.
Able beckoned me over to where he was talking quietly with his assistant director. When I reached the two men, the AD took one look at Able’s face and headed off to craft services, leaving me alone with him.
“What happened up there?” Able asked, so quietly that I had to lean in to hear him. For the first time, I noticed how his incisor teeth protruded slightly, sharp and shiny with spit.
I pulled away and shrugged as if it wasn’t a big deal. “I’m scared of heights. I thought you knew.”
Able narrowed his eyes at me and I realized instantly that I had played it wrong, that this wasn’t the time for the insouciance, the nihilism, whatever it was he normally encouraged in me. I shifted, trying to become who he needed me to be.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I don’t need you to be sorry, Grace. I just need you to step up,” Able said, and even though his words were gentle, his voice was different, as if he was struggling to disguise something I couldn’t identify. “Can you do that for me?”
“I don’t know,” I said, still thinking it was a question.
Able pressed his lips together tightly. Later, I would become an expert in reading his body language and adapting, but since Able had never been anything but generous and kind toward me up to that point, I had no idea how to navigate what was to come. Behind him, I could see Lorna and Ted, the other two assassins, watching us, and I wondered if I was imagining the satisfaction on their faces. I had never once considered how it felt to be invisible next to me.
“Anyone can be scared,” Able said slowly, and when I turned my attention back to him, everyone else faded into the background. “I’m not interested in fear. I’m interested in how we get past the fear. And how do we do that?”
