by Ella Berman
“By doing the thing we’re scared of,” I said, and Able smiled slightly. I had been listening.
“That’s right, Gracie. So do you want to try it again? I’ll spot you myself this time.”
I stood, frozen at the prospect of letting Able down but equally aware that I couldn’t do what he was asking of me. When I didn’t reply, Able’s face started to change, and I watched as his eyes became flat and his lip curled as he studied me with barely concealed disgust. It was only when it was gone that I realized the extent of his beauty, how safe I felt when he was looking at me.
“Did you forget how lucky you are to be here?” he asked. “It’s sort of interesting to me that with all these hardworking, talented people around us, somehow it’s you wasting everyone’s time.”
“I’m really sorry,” I said, but the tiny voice saying the words didn’t sound like my own. I felt scared, disoriented, as my heart rate picked up in my chest.
“You already said that,” Able said, and as he spoke he watched me closely, learning more about my malleability, my eagerness to please with every move I made. “I just wonder if Lorna, or Ted, would like to do the stunt instead. Lorna has been particularly impressive in her scenes. She’s grown up a lot in the past few months.”
“If Lorna does it . . . will she get my part?” I asked, unsure of how to verbalize what I really meant. My stomach grumbled loudly with hunger at that moment, and I felt betrayed by my body for showing weakness.
“I really can’t promise you anything right now,” Able said. “A film set is like an ecosystem, Grace, and if you refuse to play your part in it, you’re putting everyone at risk.”
“Nathan said I wouldn’t have to do any heights,” I said, and my voice was raw with the burden of letting him down. “When we signed. He said you would use a stunt double for that.”
“I don’t care about Nathan,” Able said, irritated at the mention of my agent’s name. “I care about what’s best for my movie.”
“Can I just call my mom quickly?” I asked desperately. By this point my family had already moved into the house in Anaheim, but my mom was staying with me in a hotel room in LA for the duration of the shoot. At first, she had seemed to enjoy coming to set even more than I did, but once I was allocated a studio teacher to advocate for me on set, Able told my mom that her presence wasn’t necessary anymore. I figured it was just all part of the agreement we’d made with him, the clear separation between work and home, only by the time I was dropped back to the hotel room each night, I was so exhausted I could barely string a sentence together. My mom’s questions had long since stopped and the first signs of resentment were already showing, but I still matched the rhythm of my breathing to hers when we went to sleep at night, the air conditioner humming gently in the background.
“You can call your mom whenever you want,” Able said, impossible to read. “But I don’t see how that will change anything. She’s already aware of this.”
“You spoke to her?” I asked, wondering if I’d somehow misunderstood the situation and the disdain I always secretly felt he reserved for her. Maybe she had always been welcome on set by Able: perhaps it was me who had never wanted her there.
“I spoke to her this morning. She promised me you’d be able to deliver on this.”
“Is she going to come here?” I asked. My mom knew how terrified I was of heights. She’d had to carry me down from the diving board at our local swimming pool countless times when I was younger. The memory of her warm skin, sweet with sun lotion, made my eyes prick with tears.
“Grace, you know you told me it was too much of a distraction when she visits. I’m trying to understand you right now, but you’re not making sense. I’ve noticed you’ve been doing this more and more lately—distorting reality so that it fits in with a narrative you’ve created in your mind.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, panicked.
“I mean that it’s something we have to watch out for.”
I nodded, and my grip on reality loosened with every word he spoke.
“Look, I don’t care about your mom, I don’t care about Nathan, and I don’t care about Lorna,” Able said then, his face softening slightly. “I care about you. Do you think I’d ever let anybody hurt you?”
I shook my head, still fighting back tears.
“Because what I’m hearing when you say you don’t want to do it is that you don’t trust me. Do you remember what I told you? That other people are going to try to get involved and get between us, but it doesn’t matter as long as we understand each other?”
I nodded but my legs still felt weak with fear of letting him down.
“I know you better than anyone in the world,” Able said. “Do you trust me?”
When I looked up and saw that he was almost smiling at me, my heart rate started to slow slightly. I nodded again.
“So will you try again for me?”
“I can try again,” I said, and when he broke into his perfect, famous grin, I felt so incredibly relieved to have made him happy that I figured it may even be worth going up there again.
Despite my trust in Able, my studio teacher, Carrie, still found me crying a little in my trailer at the end of lunch break, as I was putting my padding back on. I liked Carrie a lot. Her job was to make sure I didn’t fall behind with my education, but also to act as my representative and guardian on set. She had a voice like calamine lotion, and when we met she told me that her allegiance was to me, and that she would be my voice on set whenever I needed her. Carrie was the first person in my life who ever admitted to me that things were different for women, particularly in Hollywood, and she was also the first person to ever call me smart. She made me promise I would get my California Certificate of Proficiency, because the industry was particularly rough for the women who men figured they could walk all over. Even after she was long gone, I tried to see my three hours of lessons a day as something more than just an irritating distraction between scenes, despite Able making it clear that they broke my focus and set us back hours each time. After a while he just made fewer allowances for them so that the teacher would have to scramble to make up the required three hours a day in small pockets of ten or twenty minutes between takes.
When Carrie asked why I was crying, I told her. As the words flew out of my mouth before I could censor them, I watched her cheeks turn a marbled pink on my behalf. After I had finished, she walked up to the trailer Able used as an office, and opened the door without knocking. I hid in the classroom tent, but an assistant soon found me and led me up to Able’s trailer, a place that had always been my safe haven up until that point.
Carrie was standing just inside the door with her arms folded across her chest. She had taken off her glasses, and her mouth was set in a grim line. It looked like she’d been crying. Able was sitting by his desk, leaning back in his chair with one leg resting across the other. He eyed me with interest as I approached.
I looked between the two of them and then down at the steel-toed combat boots my character always wore. I already felt disoriented.
“Carrie told me that you’ve been crying. Is this true?”
He sounded benign enough, but I could hear the real question he was asking: Don’t you trust me?
“You can tell me what happened. Were you still worried about the stunt?”
I raised my eyes from the floor to look at this person who had changed my life overnight. I thought of what would happen if I got fired from the film—my visa would be voided and my family would be unceremoniously shuttled back to London, my life returning to the bleak monochrome it had been for as long as I could remember. I would have to go back to my old school where nobody was talking to me, and not only would I have let everyone on set down, but it would also mean no more special attention from my parents, no more running around a studio back lot in somebody else’s clothes, no more room service waffles with thick s
yrup and strawberries at midnight, and no more Able. I could barely remember what my world had been like before him, before this movie. I felt strong because Able had told me I was strong, impressive because he had treated me that way since the day I met him. Every single move I had made since then was because he told me to, and I felt frozen with fear at the prospect of it all ending here. Maybe Able was right when he said he knew me better than anyone else—he had always known just how much I wanted it all.
I bit my lip and stared down at the floor. “It’s not true.”
Able nodded once.
“Are you saying that Carrie is lying?”
I turned to Carrie, and in her bald, stricken face I saw a version of myself that I didn’t want to acknowledge existed. I could smell her weakness, and it made me resentful.
“She’s lying,” I mumbled, without looking at either of them.
“Say it properly, Grace,” he said, and I stood up a little straighter.
“Carrie is lying.”
It’s been hard to forget the way Carrie looked at me after I said that, like she just felt sorry for me. Able let her go on the spot, and she would be the last studio teacher I ever got close to. Over the years to come, Able would repeat the same move with various on-set teachers and guardians and, eventually, with my own parents. The only difference was that the pity on Carrie’s face would soon be replaced with a look of betrayal as people became more convinced of my complicity. Eventually it would just become easier not to get close to anyone.
That day, I left the trailer and climbed back up the fire escape steps as if I were on my way to my own funeral. My hands were slipping down the handrails and I willed myself not to cry again. I knew that it was my last chance. When I reached the top, I closed my eyes and told the actor playing opposite me to push me as soon as Able shouted action.
I felt a pair of hands on my chest and then the sensation of falling, of the wind rushing on either side of me, and it was so instantly exhilarating that I had to try not to shriek. It felt like I was flying. When I hit the crash pad, the crew cheered for me, but I barely heard them. The only thing I cared about was that Able had been right all along. The relief I felt was overwhelming: I was at peace again.
Able made me do the stunt over and over again until I got tired and careless and I cracked my head on the railing on the way down. Afterward, Able took me into his trailer and stroked my hair as I cried, while Fleetwood Mac played from his radio. The dull, thudding pain felt rich and delicious because he was being so nice to me again now that I’d shown him just how much he could trust me.
I promised myself that he would never have a reason to doubt me again. After that, whenever I was scared, it was always him I thought to run to.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The road down to my new house from Pacific Coast Highway is steep and winding. I can see Dylan in my rearview mirror, driving behind me and wearing the Ray-Bans that I think were once mine but that maybe I stole from him first. We both get out of our cars at the bottom of the track, standing in a thick cloud of dust.
Coyote Sumac is a small, U-shaped community located on the beach underneath a bluff in Malibu. The houses are mostly clapboard bungalows with a few more-modern properties built from steel and glass. Vines of bougainvillea and wisteria frame the wraparound wooden porches, and a few of the houses have golf carts with surfboards strapped onto them parked alongside the Jeeps or pickup trucks in the driveways. Like Laurel said, this is a community for surfers and hippies and, as of now, famous former child actors who just want to be left alone.
My house is set away from the others, closer to the beach, and it is unfathomably dark inside with a damp patch the shape of Russia on the ceiling over the bed. The bungalow came with a TV, a cream leather sofa with grease stains on the arms, and a red-framed double bed in the bedroom. When we saw the inside, after a last-minute viewing with a sweaty real estate agent who couldn’t stop apologizing, Laurel described it as “the kind of place an abusive husband rents when he can’t accept that he’s finally been kicked out of the family home, so he, like, gets this place for when the kids come on weekends, but they never turn up so he hangs himself in the shower to get his revenge. This shower, Grace,” while acting as if she were planning to commit me at the closest opportunity. Say what you will about Laurel, but she really knows how to paint a fucking picture.
Dylan and I unload the boxes from his car in silence, and when we’ve finished, he stands in my doorway with his hands in his pockets.
“Thank you, Dylan,” I say awkwardly, because here we are—ten boxes containing my only possessions in the world. “I think I can do the rest.”
“Okay.” He nods, but shows no signs of moving. “Look, are you sure you don’t just want to take the glass house? I’m serious. I can be out in two days, max.”
“No way, I don’t want to be there anymore. Too many . . . stairs,” I finish lamely. Dylan looks at me for a moment and then surprises me by starting to laugh.
“All right, Grace. We wouldn’t want you having to face any stairs.”
I grin as he shakes his head. I remember now that sometimes, when Dylan smiles, I would do anything in the world to keep him happy.
“Wren said she’ll come check on you in a couple days. You know you should really get a cell phone, it’s kind of insane.”
“No, I know. I will.”
“Ask Laurel. I’m sure she can help you out,” he says, without any of the resentment that comment would once have elicited. He turns to leave and then stops again, just before he opens the front door.
“So you’re sure . . . you want to do this?” he asks.
“Of course. Why wouldn’t I?” I ask. He holds my gaze and then he just shrugs. He holds one hand up and then turns away. “Call me if you need anything.”
“Will do.”
I watch him walk down the porch without turning back. You could write a symphony with our silences.
* * *
• • •
When the end came, it was so quiet it was deafening. It was a cool morning last November, only a couple of days after my final movie, Lights of Berlin, was released. I was sitting on the balcony outside our bedroom, smoking a cigarette and watching the choppy water crash against the coastline as the sky lightened. I wore a knitted sweater and plaid pajama bottoms, and I had the unfair clarity of someone who hasn’t been to sleep yet, mainly because I’d just got back from a party where I was sprinkling Molly into my own drink like it was sugar.
Dylan woke up and found me on the balcony, the tension already marked across his face and in his shoulders. I figured that someone had told him what I’d been doing, even though he wouldn’t allude to it directly. He never did and I never apologized. I would just read it in his face, and everything he didn’t say. This time, though, he sat next to me and lit his own cigarette, and then he turned to ask me something he never had before.
“Why do we find it so hard to be happy?”
It’s me, I wanted to tell him, but some things are too obvious to say. It was one of those days, weeks, months when I felt the world too strongly. My skin had been peeled away, my chest cracked open, and I was exposed to everything around me in high-definition, 3-D surround sound. The sight of an old man eating ice cream alone or an unhappy silence between a couple I didn’t even know would settle somewhere deep within me. The sound of a car horn or siren two blocks away would leave me shaking, and I’d mistake every piece of trash on the floor for a dead animal, my brain contorting and playing tricks on me, just like Able always said it did. Each moment would claim another inch of my mind until, bit by bit, it wasn’t my own anymore. I was strung out and so tired of feeling too much that I guess at some point it just became easier to not feel anything at all.
I looked out to the point where the charcoal morning sky met the ocean, and that was when I decided to tell Dylan what it was I had been trying to dro
wn out all this time. What everything always led back to. For the first time in my life, I had realized with perfect clarity that I was fucking something up before it was too late, and I even knew the way out.
“I need to tell you something,” I started, and my throat was thick and tight, as if my body still wasn’t ready to say the words I’d never said out loud. Dylan waited.
“When I first got to LA, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was by myself and things happened that I don’t think should have happened, and I want to believe it wasn’t my fault, but I’m too close to it. I don’t know if I will ever be able to explain it, even to you, but I know that I want to try, and maybe that’s enough for right now.”
The sentences were coming out as heavy fragments, but I knew that Dylan could tell it was important from the way he froze next to me. I wrapped my arms around myself and allowed myself to look at him just once more before I started again. I wanted to see the openness on his face, the way his bronze eyes softened when they were focused on me, but instead I saw something unexpected. Dylan, who was supposed to love me more than anything in the world, whom I needed to love me unquestioningly, especially when I didn’t deserve it, wanted me to stop talking. He wanted me to save him from the burden of knowing the truth.
“Grace. I can’t . . .” He didn’t finish but I understood perfectly because he looked exactly how I felt. He didn’t want to know because he wanted my story only to be his story, two lonely teenagers who fell in love in the weirdest city in the world and managed to make it work. He didn’t want to hear about the story before him, the thing that clung to my back whenever I left the house, or that sat on my chest whenever I tried to sleep.
My heart split into millions of pieces.
When I could speak again, I changed the subject, and we spoke about where we would go on vacation next. Dylan talked about sleeping under the stars in Holbox, just like he used to on camping trips when he was a kid. I already knew that I was leaving, and maybe Dylan did, too, because his words carried an unusual force that morning, as if he were trying to pin me down with them.
