by Ella Berman
“I mean that if our partnership is going to work, we’re going to need to trust each other with every single fiber of our beings. There can never be so much as a flicker of doubt between us again. Do you understand that?”
I nodded slowly.
“I trust you.”
Able pulled into the driveway of my hotel. He turned the engine off and turned to look at me.
“Now, how about I walk you up to your room, and I wax lyrical about jazz music until you fall asleep and forget this night ever happened. Does that sound good to you?”
I nodded, and as we got out of the car, I felt myself relax into his presence once again, and the decision to do so felt soothing, familiar—as if someone had finally thrown a heavy blanket over a frenzied birdcage.
* * *
• • •
Able settled in the armchair next to my bed in the hotel room. He picked up a magazine from the floor and flicked through it while I locked myself in the bathroom to change into my pajamas. Once I’d brushed my teeth, I climbed under the cool covers of the giant bed. It felt strange having him there next to me, but, as promised, he played me music from his phone, and, as I lay with my eyes closed, listening to him talk softly about Miles Davis and John Coltrane, I felt lucky to have someone looking out for me again. And this was always how it worked with us—for every time Able took something irreplaceable from me, there was an equal and opposing moment where it felt like he helped me to become more myself. There was never one without the other.
Able’s voice rose and fell like a wave that night, and a warm sense of contentment spread through me as I slipped over the line between reality and dreams.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The sound of screaming water fills my ears, and my shoulder scrapes against something sharp on the bottom of the ocean. I twist, and when I see the sun above the surface of the water, I think that maybe I will stay here forever, until something inside me snaps, like it did that night in the bathroom. I kick my way to the surface, my lungs burning as a surge of adrenaline spreads through me. When I surface I spit out some salt water and let out a shuddering breath, my vision distorted by the brightness of the real world.
I emerge twenty feet further away from the shore than when I started, and the water is as placid as a lake again. I rub my eyes. Someone is shouting my name. I squint at the shore, and somehow both Esme and Blake are standing there, waving their arms frantically. I wave back and, for some reason, I feel borderline euphoric to see my sister again, as if I can make everything up to her right now. I start to swim toward them, and as each measure of oxygen expands in my lungs, I feel lucky for the reminder of how vulnerable we are to depend on anything so much at all.
When I climb out of the water, my clothes are heavy, my jeans sagging on my hips. I wring the hem of my T-shirt out onto the sand as I approach the girls.
“What the actual fuck?” Esme asks, and now that I’m closer I can see that I’ve misunderstood, that her cheeks are wet with tears.
I pause, unsure of how to respond. I look at Blake but she averts her eyes, embarrassed for me.
“I felt like swimming,” I say in the end, because I figure they don’t necessarily need unlimited access to my psyche at this point.
“Fully clothed,” Esme says searingly. “You are so weird. What is wrong with you? I thought you’d killed yourself.”
I try to put my hand on her shoulder but she ducks away.
“I’m sorry. Look, I’m trying, Esme. You guys had left . . .”
“Esme still had your phone,” Blake says. My sister still won’t meet my eyes.
“Do you want to come in for some tea?” I ask.
Esme pauses, communicating something to Blake with her eyes that I can’t read. I pick up my shoes from the sand, and after a moment the girls follow me to my front porch. I try to act like I always go swimming fully clothed even though my shoulder is stinging from where I scraped it and spots of blood are soaking through the thin fabric of my T-shirt.
I leave Blake and Esme in the living room while I peel off my wet clothes in the bedroom, swapping them for a pair of yoga pants and Dylan’s Ohio State sweatshirt I snuck into my packing. When I come back into the living room they are both sitting up straight on the sofa. I switch on the kettle and turn back to them.
Esme hands me my phone silently. She’s already set the background to a photo of the ocean view from Coyote Sumac.
“Thanks. Can I do anything in return?” I remember the expression of horror on the face of the girl working in the drugstore when I tried to pay her, and manage not to reach for my purse to pay my sister. My transcendental near-drowning experience is already wearing off, and I’m starting to wish I hadn’t invited them back into my house, particularly as Esme is still ignoring me and I’m having trouble looking at her, too, her cheeks streaked ash gray from her tears.
The kettle emits a shrill whistle and I take it off the hob, the handle searing the palm of my hand in the process. I ball it into a fist and open a cupboard. Empty. I open another one and then remember that I didn’t bring any cups over from Dylan’s. I don’t even have any tea.
“I don’t have any cups. I’m so sorry.” I stand in the middle of the kitchen, looking around. I hold my scalded hand out as an offering.
“It’s fine, we don’t drink tea,” Blake says, smiling politely.
The girls show no signs of leaving, even though the silence has stretched well into the uncomfortable zone. I feel exposed, unsure of what to do. What do teenagers talk about? Other than Dylan, and that awful night with Elon and Alaia, I’ve rarely hung out with anyone my own age since I was in England. I wonder how long they’ll expect me to grind out polite conversation before letting me off the hook. My limbs feel heavy, as if they are filled with wet sand, and I want to get back into bed.
“Can I do anything else for you?” I ask. Esme is staring up at the ceiling with her arms folded across her chest. I look at Blake for help, and she shrugs.
“What’s it like being famous?” Blake asks, and even though I’m grateful to her for filling the silence, I’m not sure how to answer the question. Should I tell them about the time I had to be dragged out of someone’s pool because I’d blacked out while swimming naked with a famous pop star and two men that weren’t my husband? Or the morning after, when I went for a painful breakfast with a journalist from LA Weekly who described me as having a “childlike innocence, betrayed only by her trembling hands, the keynote topic in countless studio boardroom meetings across the city, no doubt.” It was the closest anyone came to referencing the industry-wide open secret of my drug use, and my manager nearly killed me. I spent the following week holed up alone in a bungalow at Chateau Marmont, bingeing on coke and reruns of I Love Lucy and ignoring everyone’s calls.
I have a feeling nothing I say is going to impress my sister. The few times I’ve seen her in the years since I moved out, she’s never expressed any interest in my job, other than once asking me if it was true that Sean Connery had a job polishing coffins before he started acting. I found out afterward that it was, but I think I forgot to tell her.
“It has its good points and bad, like anything,” I say, cringing at the mundanity of my answer. Esme snorts, which I guess is something.
“It’s not real,” I say quietly, after another moment. “None if it means anything at all.”
The girls are silent, and they don’t know what to say because they’re still kids, but Esme is at least looking at me now.
“Did you know that Sean Connery worked as a coffin polisher before he started acting?” I ask, trying to lighten the leaden atmosphere I have single-handedly created.
“Do you ever speak to Dylan?” Blake asks, leaning forward and twisting her earring.
I stand up quickly. “Okay, girls, thanks for fixing my phone, but I have some stuff I need to get on with now.”
“W
hat kind of stuff?” Esme finally speaks, squinting at me warily. “Drowning-yourself stuff?”
“Grown-up stuff. I need to meditate,” I say. Esme nods, seemingly satisfied for the moment.
“My mom does cryotherapy for her depression,” Blake tells me helpfully on their way out.
I watch the girls get into the red car, then I remember Laurel at the last minute and shout after them. “Don’t tell anyone about the Crocs!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
I push my silk eye mask up and hold the vibrating phone close to my face so that I can read it through the blur of another heavy night’s sleep. The eye mask has been doing its job too well recently, and I’m finding it nearly impossible to get out of bed before midday. When I do wake up, my brain feels furry and strange, as if I’m wading through a swimming pool of thick clay just to form a sentence.
I hold the phone up to my ear as the air-conditioning unit in the bedroom blasts warm, damp air over me.
“Grace, I messed up. Nathan and Kit have been harassing me for your address, and I gave them your cell number. Do you hate me?” Wren asks, sounding upset.
“No, it’s fine,” I say, stretching slightly and trying to keep the sleep out of my voice because it’s eleven thirty on a Monday . . . or maybe it’s Tuesday. “I needed to call them anyway so they stop ringing the house.”
“Are you going to start working again? Feminist space movie?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I guess I’ll see what they think.”
“Who’s the one who talks really fast? Nathan? He sounds pretty pissed.”
“I can only imagine.”
I assure Wren one more time that I don’t hate her, and then I hang up and call my old agent Nathan.
* * *
• • •
Nathan and Kit were with me from that very first dinner at Nobu. Able brought them on to represent me when I moved over, and the two of them, plus Able and my publicist, Nan, became my team and, in effect, my new family.
Nathan, my agent, is the younger of the two, probably only just nearing forty now, and he hadn’t had much success when I signed with him. What he lacked in experience, however, he made up for in arrogance and delusion, two qualities admired above all else by men in this industry. Now he looks after some of the biggest names in the business and has an office with a view from Korea Town to Pacific Palisades to prove it.
Kit, my manager, likes to think of himself as a more cerebral man. It’s definitely an image he has cultivated, playing the role of a beleaguered Ivy League professor who has rather embarrassingly found himself embroiled in our indecent industry. As far as I’m aware, Kit grew up in San Diego and comes from NASCAR money.
We meet at Nathan’s office like we always used to. It’s been redone again, and everything in the room is now bright white, including Nathan’s jeans and his ratty Pomeranian, Dusty. It’s like stepping into a seventies insane asylum.
“The prodigal daughter returns.” Kit pulls me into a hug even though I’ve told him at least forty times over the years not to touch me. He gestures to the white leather sofa, and I’m stepping across the shaggy white rug when Nathan grabs my arm and shakes his head.
“Honey, no. This rug is worth more than your marriage. It’s not for walking on.”
“No problem.” I roll my eyes and climb over it dramatically. I’ve always been on my worst behavior with the two of them, and I naturally fall back into it. I met them when I was thirteen, and it was the only role I ever carved out for myself.
Kit sits in an ivory and chrome chair opposite me while Nathan paces the room in front of the window.
“Someone forgot their Ritalin today,” I say, and my first clue that this isn’t going to go how it used to is that neither of them laughs. Dusty curls up on the white rug below me, and I look at Nathan pointedly. He doesn’t say anything.
“First of all, welcome back to LA, Grace,” Kit says, steepling his hands like a Bond villain.
“How was Anaheim?” Nathan asks, saying it as if I’ve been in Fallujah and not a mere forty miles outside of Los Angeles.
“I should have told you where I was,” I say courteously.
“You also shouldn’t have left,” Nathan says.
“That’s debatable.”
“It’s not. Debatable,” Nathan says, and I think he’s gotten hair plugs since I left. Was everyone just waiting until I left the city to fulfill their cosmetic surgery goals? “You realize we’ve spent the best part of ten years working with you, right? We have built an entire network based on you being here, showing up and working. Your actions are no longer just your own at this point. You do understand that?”
“Nathan—” Kit interrupts, but Nathan holds up his hand. His lips are slick with spittle, and he wipes them with the back of his hand. When he puts his palm on the desk to steady himself, I can see the glob of saliva on his knuckles, and it makes me feel embarrassed for him. Nathan used to invite me over to his house in Brentwood and his entire family would treat me like I was Beyoncé, calling in the sushi chef from Katsuya and opening $800 bottles of wine that I inevitably ended up knocking over when I got too drunk.
“I just need to check that she understands that if this was any other business, we’d be able to sue the fuck out of her. Because it’s not like the CEO of a tech company going missing, or even the lead designer, it’s as if the fucking product itself disappears into thin air. Do you get it?”
“Like I said, I should have told you where I was.” I fold my arms across my chest and shift in my seat like a child in trouble.
“In all honesty, Grace, yes, you could have sent an email. We looked like retards,” Kit adds, and my surprise must show on my face because he shrugs and mouths what? at me after.
Nathan stands in front of the window with his arms folded across his chest. The winter sun spills in behind him, lighting him up like an angel. “You know that people very nearly forgot about you. I don’t know if that surprises you, but it shouldn’t.”
“Did you call this meeting to tell me that I’m expendable?” I ask, more surprised than anything.
“Not entirely. But yeah, everyone is expendable. What? I’m being honest,” he says when Kit frowns at him.
“I think what Nathan is really trying to say is that what you do next is very important. Have you . . . heard from Able?” Kit asks delicately.
I shake my head as my heart rate speeds up. I don’t think I realized it at the time, but Able chose them too. They were nowhere near as successful as he was, so when Able suggested they team up, they probably jizzed in their Calvins at the mere thought. Maybe they don’t know who they are without him either.
“Gracie sweetheart?” Kit prompts.
Gracie sweetheart. Said as if I’m still thirteen, fresh in LA in a Minnie Mouse T-shirt and a pair of cream Converse signed by all my friends back home.
“I still don’t understand what happened,” Nathan says, looking up at the ceiling as if summoning all of God’s strength just to deal with me.
I move in my seat, staring past them and out the window, at the city sprawled beneath us. I’ve seen this view at least five hundred times, from the highest peak of Runyon Canyon to the rooftop of Soho House, and I have never understood what people like so much about this city. Dylan used to try to explain how much energy he found in the twinkling lights of the valleys and the pastel houses sprouting up in the hills, how much beauty he saw in even the darkest corners of Hollywood and the dusty Topanga Canyon trails concealing rattlesnakes and mountain lions. The problem was, I could never see any of it through the smog.
“Like you said, everyone’s expendable,” I say coldly.
“Are you sure there’s nothing you can do to fix it? You didn’t do anything to upset him?” Nathan asks, still desperate to understand just how the well dried up so suddenly.
“Nathan, we’ve been t
hrough all of this. It’s over.”
Nathan shakes his head, glancing at Kit for support. “Let’s see how you feel about that after a year of making holiday movies for Hallmark.”
“Okay, there’s no need to be mean,” I say, frowning as Dusty lets out a piercing yelp.
“He made you what you are, Grace. I don’t know if you can come back from that,” Nathan says snidely.
And that’s when it hits me that Able still controls it all. He set it up from the start so that he is at the core of every choice I make and every choice made for me, and the best part is, he never even has to think about me. My career, my relationships, even where I live: Able is still at the crux of it all. Maybe he knew all along that without him I would become untethered, floating all alone in the ether of Hollywood. He always knew that nobody else would want to touch me.
“Isn’t it your job to figure that out? It seems like a flawed business model to only have one available avenue for your client,” I say bitingly.
“Grace. Your last movie came out over a year ago. If you found a project tomorrow, the movie could take up to three years to be released. In that time, even the microscopic percentage of moviegoers who still care about you will have forgotten you. You were one fucking movie away from being a household name. One movie.” Nathan slides into the chair behind his desk and places both of his palms in two tiny sandpits on either side of his Mac. He traces his fingers lightly through the sand and then gently rubs them together until his hands are clean again. I raise my eyebrows at Kit, but he just shrugs. I figure that Nathan’s feng shui guy has instructed him to do this to calm down in moments of high pressure, and he seems to have nearly achieved it when he catches sight of me. A deep red flush climbs up his baby-smooth neck, and his lips tighten.
