by Various
But now there’s no choice.
Being here for today—for tonight—is what anyone would choose to do now.
I lay my hand on my phone, facedown on the patio table, and the lines of the texts I know are there on the screen shoot pain through my chest so strong I think my lungs might shred. A deafening noise from behind launches me up to my feet, and for several seconds I am sure that sound was the explosion of me, my insides blown out.
Ignoring the other diners’ whispers and stares—several more have recognized me—I look down to find, to my surprise, my body intact. I step from the patio toward the hub of the crash just inside the French doors of Las Brisas, where the tile is covered in shattered teal ceramic and glass.
A waitress’ platter has fallen and she is in tears. A man in a tailored white shirt with his cell to his ear must have just barreled past, and he turns now to glance back. I know he must have jostled her arm—because my mother was in this profession, and one sees these things all the time. I also know he will say nothing, and neither will the waitress—because he won’t and she can’t.
Bending, I help pick up the shards. I know the rapid-fire clicks around us are cell phone cameras snapping pictures of a Hollywood celebrity’s kindness.
Which is nonsense.
My scooping teal crockery shards off Mexican tile is only about this particular day and those texts on my screen. And about my mother and her off-season income and how waitresses don’t get enough credit or enough tips to support the kids they are raising alone—all alone with no help from the men who knock them sideways or knock them up.
I nod to the waitress, whose mascara has smeared down to her chin, as she murmurs a string of thankyouI’msoembarrassed. And I seat myself quickly back on the patio across from the perky little reporter, who is looking at me now with adoring eyes. Which makes me glare out at the sea. This reporter does not know me, and she does not understand.
I catch bits of her preamble to me before she launches her questions, and all her well-rehearsed fawning is making me cringe—visibly, I hope.
“One of the finest actresses of your generation,” she begins, and I hope she’ll end there.
Because this much is objectively true. Tonight is proof of that. I don’t bother to argue coyly, or even thank her.
But she gushes on—and here’s where she goes wrong.
“One of the finest, perhaps the finest…of all time.”
My sunglasses might hide the roll of my eyes here—but if she sees my disgust, so much the better. Perhaps she’ll be shamed into silence. Because this last gurgle of hers betrays one of two things: pitiful ignorance or mindless flattery. Either way, it annoys me.
I restrain myself from shaking her skinny shoulders in their black wool blazer—or observing that only a writer, and especially one from Manhattan, would wear black wool at an outdoor café high on the hills of Laguna Beach. I do not bury her with the obvious landslide of names from film and stage: Dame Judi Dench or Helen Mirren or the Hepburns, Katharine and Audrey both, or Ingrid Bergman—or Meryl Streep, for God’s sake.
I am good at what I do, and I don’t pretend not to know this. But I’m not yet in their ranks, and to imply that I’ve done at forty what these women have done over their lifetimes shows a lack of respect for the depth that comes only with age.
Watching my mother has taught me this. There is a soul-stretching and breadth that comes with a life well lived and work well done. And there’s no shortcut to it, other than slogging with courage over the years.
The reporter is asking me something—and she looks confused. “Your…mother?”
“Sorry. Just thinking out loud.” I lift my Diet Coke in a gesture of penance.
I am trying not to hear the waves slamming themselves into the rock. I am trying not to keep thinking of death. Or who must have been lying to me.
The reporter is blinking at me from behind her tortoiseshell frames.
“Of course.” She is quick to excuse my rudeness—because she has little choice. “You must be beyond thrilled. About tonight, of course.”
Clearly, the young reporter is new and still starstruck—and no doubt tonight will be her first invitation to the Oscars. Actually, it’s also my first, despite earlier films that industry watchers insist should have gotten me there long before. The Academy likes to punish those who commence a career in chick flicks.
But why, I wonder, is the New York Times’ Arts & Leisure editor sending what looks like a college intern to do their film interviews now? I’m hardly ancient, but this young thing with a pen tucked behind one ear like Hepburn—Katharine, not Audrey—in My Girl Friday appears to be only just beyond pimples and Justin Bieber posters. And no one her age has even seen Hepburn in Friday.
This is better: I have shifted my attention to the reporter herself, not on the news that I’ve just received or the phone call I will have to make soon or the dark eddies of swirling fear, the downward suck and pull and spin in my head.
As distraction, I force myself to examine the reporter’s small face: a fluff of brown frizzy bob framing unremarkable features. I do not point out that while I respect her lack of makeup as a kind of nonconforming independence, I could also observe that most women—most people in general—could do with a bit of help. And that a wand-flip of mascara and a little lip gloss never hurt anyone, including New York film critics.
“The intellectual tortoiseshell frames,” I want to tell her, “are fooling no one, sugar.” But we don’t call people sugar here in Southern California, and I ought to try, at least, to trust she’s as smart as the glasses would have me believe.
I dislike props that are meant to make me elevate someone’s IQ before I’ve had a chance to judge for myself. And I despise being led to surmise something that is not the case.
Which slings my thoughts back to the texts on my screen. The phone call I need to make now.
“They let me believe what I wanted to hear,” I observe—though I’d not meant to observe it out loud. “And she must have bald-faced lied to me.”
“I don’t…I’m sorry.” The reporter is bewildered, thrown off what little stride she’d established. “Who…let you believe…?”
“Nothing.” I shake my head. “Forgive me. I have a good deal on my mind just now.”
Relieved, she brightens and reverts to gushing. “I can only imagine! On today of all days!”
If she says that again, I may have to smack her makeup-free little face. She has no idea the twist of a knife those five words are to me now.
On today of all days.
I speak the line now that needs saying, and not what I’d like to tell her: “You were about to ask me a question. Go ahead.”
I can see that my tone must be sharp by the startled look in her eyes—eyes that do not stand out from her face.
I do not feel in the mood to use a friendlier tone, but this is where one’s professional training comes in. I smooth my face into unobjectionably pleasant and give the people eavesdropping around us the voice they will Instagram about in a moment when they’ve managed to snap pictures from behind their margaritas: OMG, Mia Jensen is even kinder in person than she is on the screen!
“Please,” I tell the reporter gently. “You were speaking and I interrupted. I apologize if I seem a bit distracted at the moment.”
I’ve had some life-upending news. Distracted does not even begin to cover what I am feeling, I nearly add. But do not.
“Please do go on with the question you’d started,” I say instead. And I add an I’m-just-riveted tilt of the head to finish it out.
“Well, Mia—may I call you Mia? I wanted to ask, Ms. Jensen—I mean Mia.” She laughs at this too hard, and it’s clear she does not drink often—at least not two glasses of wine back to back before nine in the morning, and never in full Laguna Beach sun. She will regret the second glass later when she looks a
t the tangled mess of her notes. “I wanted to ask if this is your actual name or a stage name. Mia Jensen just sounds so…” She blushes behind the glasses. “So elegantly Hollywood. So I…well, I just wondered, you know?”
“Mia Grace Jensen was my given name, yes.” I tense here, but keep going. I know how to keep speaking as tension builds. “Given by my mother, the only parent I ever had in the picture. Though plenty enough parent. Plenty tough. And the most loving… It was like her arms stayed always ready for a wrap-around hug, no matter what I’d just…” My voice crumples in on itself here, and I pause. My voice rarely goes rogue on me. I steel myself. Sip my Diet Coke. “The Grace is after my mother. Grace Jensen.”
Grace Jensen. Who lives alone in the mountains, hefting a platter of food over her head, despite my success.
“Great. And now, Mia, if I could follow that fairly practical question with a more, you know, existential one. Or maybe what I mean is more theoretical. Or more…”
“Yes?” I am not feeling gracious, but I act the part.
“Well, really, it’s sort of a ludicrous question for a woman such as yourself who’s already achieved what you have—and to ask it on this day of all days!”
I clench my teeth and manage to make my mouth turn slightly upward. I don’t dare to speak.
“But, Mia, I simply have to ask… Okay, here it is: Do you have any…” She pauses a beat for suspense, and I grip the edges of my chair for patience. “Any regrets?”
My head snaps back as if I’ve been struck. My placid expression has gone suddenly tight. My lips press hard together.
Regrets.
And to ask it on this day of all days, she’d said.
The reporter does not need to spell out for me—or for anyone eavesdropping nearby—what this day refers to.
The reporter would think, of course, that she knows what this day means to the household-name star Mia Jensen, whose basic story everyone knows.
Mia Jensen, who began her career straight out of high school productions of Oklahoma! and Grease, Mia’s own mother whipping out the last stitches—sometimes only hot-glued, since Grace Jensen really wasn’t much of a seamstress—on costumes backstage mere moments before the costumes went prancing past the school’s moth-eaten red velvet curtains.
Mia Jensen, whose own path to stardom was mostly glittered and smooth. From that first romantic comedy at eighteen, her name became synonymous with heartwarming, charmingly quirky love stories with just the right measure of conflict before the unfeasible but sweetly satisfactory happy ending.
And then Mia Jensen, observing that actresses over thirty-five no longer land chick flick roles except as the mentor shopkeeper, strategically began instructing her agent only to accept scripts that were substantive. Which led to Mia Jensen, Actress to Be Taken Seriously.
Which led, of course, to today: Mia Jensen, nominee for Best Actress—and the front-runner, People and Variety both have insisted, to win that category tonight at the Academy Awards.
“Now, Mia, by regrets, I didn’t mean to pry. Or to imply that…”
Head snapping sharply away, I make myself draw a deep breath. The salt air of Laguna is always a comfort, scented as it is with these roses and the heather and sage that grow along the cliffs and the oil paints of local artists who set up their canvases along the shore and the fresh seafood of the cafés.
And, let’s be honest, that most comforting scent of all: the smell of new money.
The leather seats of the sports cars. The mulch of the landscaping crews. The just-cut lumber of mansion renovation. The coconut oil of people with time to stroll in the sun.
“Do you have any regrets?” the reporter is asking again now—trying hard not to look as impatient as she must surely feel. I give her credit for this.
I look her dead in the eye. “How many people do you think would regret owning an eight-bedroom house at Laguna Beach, a penthouse condo in Pasadena, closer to the Paramount lot, and having planned her whole life, everything she said no to, everything that she left behind, for getting to walk the red carpet tonight?”
The reporter thinks it’s a rhetorical question and she laughs, nodding in what she thinks is agreement.
But it was a real question. I am wanting to hear her real answer.
“You are forty,” she ventures. Then hastily adds, “Though, oh my God, you don’t look it at all.”
“I work at staying fit,” I tell her. And I let my eyes drift back to the ocean so hers can drop to my calves, which are the legs, she’ll be able to see, of a runner. Out of my peripheral vision, I see her jot this down in her notes.
“A commitment to fitness,” she murmurs as she scribbles. “Still naturally gorgeous at forty.”
The naturally isn’t entirely accurate. But I refuse to be coaxed into confessing the occasional injection or the infrequent nip or tuck. She is probably too young still to realize that no one looks this way at forty without a bit of surgical lift.
And gorgeous is a bit much—a throwaway flattery word. But I am nice looking for forty, it’s true—particularly now for a Serious Actress. This isn’t vanity on my part. It’s simply part of my job as a woman in this profession—to track and adjust my appearance, much as a novelist might monitor her word count for the day or total her royalties for the year.
Besides, most of how I look has little to do with myself so much as what I inherited from genetics—my mother’s. Grace Jensen with her long, slender legs and neck, even at sixty. Grace Jensen with her statuesque frame and her thick waving hair…at least, until the treatments this year.
Regrets.
On this day of all days, the little meddler asked.
And here she sits squirming and thinking she’s upset the celebrity actress simply by prying on the morning of the Oscars.
She has no idea the real reason that this day would feel like of all days to me.
The reporter, her frizzy brown bob tossing as she glances toward the Pacific, would have no idea about the texts that slid onto my phone just before she arrived—the texts that upended my world.
“Regrets,” I say, letting the word sift out slow.
“I didn’t mean to…”
Lowering my sunglasses, I level a gaze at her and give her the most wan of smiles. “Isn’t that what you reporters do best? Pry? And imply things?”
The reporter flutters her pen at the pad, but jots down nothing. Then gulps at her Chardonnay.
As if that will help at nine in the morning.
They’ve sent a newbie this time, I decide now, likely because her daddy was the editor’s attorney or college roommate. And since I am quite likely to win Best Actress, I will be hard to schedule an interview with for some weeks hereafter.
“Clever,” I comment aloud. Because I admire people who plan ahead. Something I’ve done all my life. And never looked back.
Never, that is, until—perhaps—today.
Today of all days.
I reach for my phone facedown on the table, but do not have to lift it to recall every word of the texts, beginning with:
Mia, you’ll be shocked to hear from an old friend.
An old friend.
No doubt he’d considered carefully just how to word that. Friendship was not the word I would have used for the heat and the laughter and wildness and passion we had. The cyclone of emotion that was us.
But what other word could he have used, given who we are now—and on this of all days?
It’s Scott Sandlin, and I…I wish I were contacting you for a happier reason.
The sight of his name alone, only that, after all these years would have unmoored me enough. But then came more:
Found your number on your mother’s phone since she wouldn’t hear of calling you herself. This is your night, she says.
MY GOD she’s fierce in protecting that.
&nbs
p; Yes. That would be Grace.
And then another text had slid onto my screen.
But I think the Mia that I remember would want to know.
The Mia that I remember…
Now there was a loaded phrase. Implying that only the old—and presumably more compassionate—Mia would want to know.
And then the lines that exploded inside me.
They say now we may be down to days, or even hours.
I was still feeling my insides blow all apart when the black wool blazer–clad young woman approached, pen behind one ear, across the Las Brisas patio. She’d been just sitting down when another text dinged.
Call me anytime.
And then, as if Scott Sandlin had feared that last could be read in light of our past, he’d added one final text:
For more on her condition
Call me, he’d said.
And I should have, right away. Of course. It’s what any decent person would do. I should have told the approaching reporter she could wait.
But there’d been the shattering glass and ceramic and my stopping to help.
And then I’d been numb and in shock.
And by now I’d put off that call for a half hour because seeing the words on my screen is bad enough—like reading a script. But hearing the words spoken will make it real.
And I am still needing it not to be real.
Even now, I could send the reporter away.
“I’d ordinarily love to keep our appointment for this interview,” I might say, “but, you see, I’ve had some news I’d reason to believe I wouldn’t receive—not any time soon. And I’m expected at the red carpet in not too many hours. I’m expected to emerge from the limo sleek and assured, with waxed legs and painted nails and no swollen eyes or dark circles by then. So won’t you excuse me for now?”
Right now, I could send the reporter packing.
But I am Mia Jensen. Who planned out her dreams with meticulous care and unending drive—and made them happen. Who took her losses and launched herself out of a small town and hitchhiked all the way to L.A. and took Hollywood by its tail.
