The View Was Exhausting

by Mikaella Clements

  “Oh, babe,” Lila said. She leaned in and spoke in an exaggerated stage whisper. “I’m the wife.”

  “Ha,” Win said. For a moment everything was blurry and then it coalesced again, Leo’s horror and Lila’s cocky smile. “What?”

  Then Lila stuck out her hand, wiggling her fingers. On her left ring finger was a tarnished bronze band with a filmy pink jewel, just the same as Leo’s. Win blinked. She turned to Leo, who was clearly miserable, looked at his stricken face with his mouth half-open, looked at Hae and Alex, who were a mixture of laughing and guilty, and looked, finally, at Leo’s hand, at his fucking ring, at the ugly cheap ring that he’d lied to her about, once aloud and every second before and after, like she didn’t deserve to know the truth.

  “Right.” Win thought of her conversation with Shift and of Leo’s desperate attempts to talk to her and wanted to laugh, hysterical and furious. God, she’d been such an idiot. Of course Leo wasn’t nurturing secret feelings for her. Of course it was this: Leo being irresponsible, and untrustworthy, and selfish, and reminding her for the hundredth time why they would never, ever work.

  “Win,” Leo said. “Whitman, listen—”

  “You can’t remember, huh?” Win said. She tried to keep her voice level. It was important not to attract any more attention. “You picked it up somewhere in Vegas? I—” She stopped and laughed. It sounded brittle even to her own ears. “No, right, that makes sense.”

  “I think I won the rings, actually,” Lila said. “Leo’s got a terrible poker face.”

  “Whitman,” Leo said. “Come with me—”

  “No, you stay here,” Win said. “I’m leaving.” She turned and stalked away, keeping her face as composed as possible, pulling her phone out of her clutch with hands that were only slightly shaking. She couldn’t find the exit and the car that was waiting; she swung a hard right, deeper into the innards of the castle instead, wanting only to be away, and alone.

  Leo followed her, though she moved quickly and darted through enough doors and crowds of milling people that he took a while to find her again. By then she’d discovered a side room, dark except for one bare bulb hanging in threads of electrical wiring from the ceiling, empty except for the mess of party planning, deflated balloons and used confetti dispensers shoved into boxes in the corner. When he came in she turned away, focused on her phone call.

  “No, I’m fine,” she said. She was annoyed that Leo had come in time to hear her say so. It was true, but she thought it might be coming out defensive. “It’s a massive pain, of course, but—yes, I know—”

  “Win,” Leo said as he closed the door. Win held out her hand, one finger pointed up, a polite one moment please. Leo’s eyes narrowed.

  “I’ll find the car,” Win said. “Yeah, that’s him.”

  “Hang up,” Leo told her. He was coming closer with intent; Win sidestepped him, skipped out of the way. “Win, c’mon, talk to me.”

  “Yeah, I assume he’s here to grovel,” Win said. Leo’s mouth twisted. “Okay, look, I’ll talk to you soon. Thank you. Thanks. Bye.”

  She hung up.

  “Win.”

  “Yep,” Win said. He was right there but she felt very far away. “Go on, then. Let’s hear it.”

  Leo rubbed his hand over his face. He was like a child, Win thought, who didn’t know what to do with attention once he’d claimed it.

  “You’ve got about five minutes,” Win said, tapping out a text message to Emil, “and then I’m leaving. I’ve got an early flight tomorrow, so—”

  “What?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Win said. “Did you want to hang around with your fake girlfriend and your apparently real wife? That’s such a sensible thing to do, it should have occurred to me.”

  “Win,” Leo said, and took a step forward, grabbing her hands. “I’m really sorry. I should have told you.”

  Win wrenched herself out of his grip. “You think?”

  “I tried to,” Leo said. “But it’s complicated. I couldn’t get you alone, and then there was all this other stuff going on—”

  “Right,” Win spat. “I forgot this was my fault.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Leo said. “Come on, Win, look at tonight—I tried to get you on your own—”

  “You told me that you didn’t want to see the band because it ended weirdly,” Win snapped. “Is that your definition of a wedding?”

  “I shouldn’t have said that,” Leo said. “I was trying to tell you and it was— We kept getting interrupted, I panicked. I didn’t want you to find out like this.”

  “Oh, you’re such a gentleman.”

  “Just listen to me.” Win wanted to look away and couldn’t. Leo could get so serious so fast, could demand things of her that no one else could. “I got a call from Marie in the middle of the night that Nathan fucked you over and you needed me and then—you wouldn’t talk about him—”

  “What does Nathan have to do with any of this?” She took a step forward, set her hands against his chest, and shoved him. It felt good to finally shout, a month or a year or a decade’s worth of frustration unleashed on Leo, who finally deserved it. “You lied to me!”

  “I know! I know!” Leo turned, running his hand over his head, taking a few rough steps away and whirling back. “I just mean everything was weird, and you were upset, and I wasn’t ready for it, and there was never a good time to tell you.”

  “We’ve spent every day together for a week,” Win said. “Don’t blame this on me. You know what my life’s like. If you wanted to tell me, you would have told me.”

  “I should have,” Leo said. He licked his lips. “I wanted to. I didn’t want it to be like this. Really, I’m not lying, I didn’t think we’d see her, I didn’t think it was going to be an issue. I wasn’t thinking about her, I was thinking about you.”

  “Oh yeah, you’re such a good guy,” Win said, and leaned against the wall, arms hugged around herself. “Leo, you’re married?”

  “It’s complicated,” Leo repeated. His voice sounded like it had been dragged over coals. “The whole thing was so intense. I haven’t even seen her in a couple of months, we barely talk.”

  “I just can’t believe you didn’t tell me,” Win said.

  “I didn’t want to hurt you.”

  “Well, this will,” she said. “You must know that.”

  “I thought that I could explain in a way that would, like—” Leo stopped speaking so abruptly that Win turned to look behind him, wondering if someone had come in and shut him up. But it was just Leo, his brow furrowed in the dim light. “Wait. Will hurt you?”

  “How long do you think you can keep your secret marriage a secret for?” she demanded. “You’re not this oblivious, Leo, come on!”

  “What exactly are you angry at me about?” Leo’s voice was strained.

  Win stared at him. “You know what.”

  “Yeah,” Leo said, pushing off the wall toward her, “yeah, but—why, then?”

  “You’re going to mess everything up,” she said. “The press are going to find out. No one’s going to believe in our relationship if you have a secret wife. If anyone figures out it’s a publicity stunt—”

  “Holy shit.” Leo let out a breath, and Win felt her whole body light up with outrage.

  “Do you think I’m jealous?” she snarled. “I’m working, Leo! I’m doing my job! You’re the one fucking about, you’re the one who thinks this doesn’t mean anything—”

  Leo’s expression was mutinous. “Am I?”

  “Yes! I trusted you! How am I meant to be able to trust you for this stuff when you keep secrets that can fuck everything up?”

  “Who were you on the phone with just now?”

  “What?”

  “On the phone,” Leo said. “You were talking to someone about me. Was it Shift? Was it your mum?”

  “No,” Win said. “No, obviously, it was Marie.”

  “You’re unbelievable.”

  “Oh, get over you
rself,” Win snapped. “This is a business arrangement, and I don’t appreciate you acting like you don’t know that.”

  “You don’t appreciate it,” Leo repeated, face dark with anger. “Jeez, Win, I’m sorry to disappoint you. I guess it’s just hard for us normal people sometimes. It gets hard being fake about everything all day every day. Not everyone lives their life based on what it’s going to look like on the fucking internet!”

  Win gaped at him. That yawning, hollow, terrible feeling was eating further into her chest, and Leo was breathing hard, like it was something he’d wanted to say for a long, long time.

  “You’re right,” she said. “You don’t care what your life looks like at all. You’re going to spend the next forty years being as spoiled and aimless as—”

  “This isn’t about what I want to do with my life.”

  “Nothing’s ever about what you want to do with your life,” Win said. She was rigid with the effort of keeping her voice level. “Are you mad at me for having ambitions? For going after them? You’ve been going on about your studio for years and you haven’t even picked a fucking country for it. Sometimes I think you just talk about it to cover up how empty your life is.”

  “You got me,” Leo said through gritted teeth.

  “It’s pathetic,” Win said. “Your whole life is set up for you and you still can’t do anything with it. You can have anything you want. All you have to do is take it, and you can’t even be bothered to reach out.”

  “Fuck you, Whitman.”

  Win bared her teeth in a smile. “I think that’s adultery now.”

  “I can do what I want,” Leo said, stepping up close. “It was never part of our deal that I have to live by your robotic standards—”

  “Then go live your life,” Win said, “and stop messing up my plans. Just leave.”

  “No,” Leo said, “listen. You can manage Marie and Emil and the paparazzi—you can manage Nathan and your mum—but I won’t let you manage me.”

  “I think you’ve misunderstood something there, Leo,” she said. “I’ve been managing you for years.”

  They stared at each other. Leo was trembling with rage.

  In her hand, where she was still clutching it, Win’s phone started to buzz. She looked down and saw Ma flashing up on the screen. Leo saw it too; his lip curled. You can manage your mum. Win wanted to hit something.

  “Ma,” she said, picking up and turning away from Leo; she was done with Leo. “This isn’t a great time—”

  “Whitman.” It wasn’t her mum. It was her aunt. “I’m sorry to call so late. But I think you need to come home.”

  California London

  Chapter Ten

  Kuffel Canyon, California, is a stone’s throw south of Lake Arrowhead. Because of the thickness of the pines, it feels like there’s a great distance between you and any other people, even though the woods are dotted with cabins and holiday homes. There’s a small village on the south side of the lake, with a harbor, a rinky-dink amusement park, and a general store where you can pick up candy and fresh-cut watermelon. The store closes at eleven p.m., so every night that summer at around ten thirty, Lila and Leo and whoever else was awake would pile into her secondhand Ford Fiesta and cruise into the village. Most of the bars and restaurants stayed open late at that time of year, but the village still felt sleepy, and the cashier who rang up their purchases of green vegetables and Anchor Steam beer was usually yawning. Some nights the sky was clear enough that they could see the starry rim of the San Bernardino Mountains from the parking lot.

  The band split the rent of their cabin fifty-fifty with their label. There were two bedrooms, one occupied by Alex and Hae, the other by the band’s drummer, Jennifer. Officially, Lila slept on the foldout camp bed in the laundry room, and Leo had the couch. In reality the cabin was furnished like a kid’s fort, every surface soft and roomy, full of cushions and beanbags and love seats, and they tended to fall asleep wherever they fell. More than once Leo had lost track of time and spent the night in the hammock on the porch. He woke up covered in insect bites and had to spend the next day taking ice baths in the porcelain tub.

  Eighteen months before he came to Saint-Tropez, Leo had arrived in LA for the spring, because his dad had requested Leo’s presence at the thirtieth anniversary party of one of his hotels. He’d also requested that Leo take a room there for the week, but Leo told him he already had a place to crash. Alex was a friend from New York who used to project kaleidoscopic animations on the walls of loft parties until he moved to LA to start a band. He came to pick Leo up from LAX, along with a girl wearing a ripped denim jacket and Birkenstocks. They were arguing at the arrivals gate. After Alex had introduced them, she grabbed Leo by the elbow and said, “Settle this for us, do you think this text is scary or sexy,” and held out her phone to him. Leo was jet-lagged and confused. It took him several blinks to make a judgment.

  “Both,” he said, and the girl crowed in triumph.

  “You’re too good for Alex,” she told him, hitting send. “You’re mine now.” Leo stretched and thought, Well, why not.

  The party came and went, and Leo shook enough hands and drew in enough photographers for his dad to send him a grudging thank-you note signed, With all due respect, Bernard Milanowski.

  “I’d say he’s a dick,” Lila said, “but I’d kill for your trust fund. You can deal.”

  Lila had lived in LA since she was twenty and had worked at a greengrocer, an anarchist pet store, and several vegan restaurants before her music finally started bringing in enough money for her to focus on it full-time. The band never hit the mainstream, but they had been featured on a few indie movie soundtracks, and they had a scrappy cult following across the States. She had also cowritten a love song that was passed down the line and reproduced into a one-hit wonder, and the royalties from that twinned with various other songwriting credits made her enough money to live on. She rented a room in a house in Echo Park with five other people and an outdoor kitchen. The floor was always sticky and her room was full of empty bottles, but Leo loved to wake up there, to hear the early morning sounds of her roommates around him while they lay curled in her bed.

  When she told him that they were renting a cabin for the summer where they could write their next album, Leo signed up to join them before she’d even offered. He had spent the last two months drifting between Alex’s and Lila’s houses, and now he looked up for the first time and realized he had no plans to leave. His father was spending the summer at one of his resorts and was unlikely to need Leo. Gum was busy fumbling deals in New York, and Hannah had dropped off the radar since March. Win was filming back-to-back projects and had been seen holding hands with a panel show host, so nobody was looking for Leo. He disappeared with Lila into the woods.

  “You can pay for groceries,” Lila said. “And you can have my back when Alex starts messing with my lyrics.”

  In the early evenings when the air was cooler, they would take hikes into the pine forests or drive to the lake and swim together in the shadow of the mountains. Depending which beach they were at, they could sometimes see the watchtower at Strawberry Peak glinting in the darkness. This always made Alex paranoid, because he had read too many articles about government surveillance and was distrustful of lights that came on at night with no apparent function. He avoided cameras, security checks, and social media, and the rest of the band indulged him. Leo’s online presence shrank down to his weekly video calls with Gum, who gave forlorn monologues on various feuds with more-successful businessmen and chastised Leo for the state of his personal grooming.

  It was the sort of idyll Win would’ve rolled her eyes at. Lila rolled her eyes a lot, too, but she also took pure enjoyment from her surroundings in a way that Leo had only seen imitated before. She stayed up the latest and woke up the earliest. She wrote strange, yelping, sexy songs, and she played her own albums at her own parties. When she wanted his attention, she would wave a hand in front of his face like he’d fallen asleep. W
hen he wanted her attention, he would reach out as she ran past and hook a finger in the belt loop of her shorts to slow her down. They took long drives together and climbed to the top of the Pinnacles. Once when they were both sick, she flew her older sister in from Orlando to look after them.

  He’d wondered for a while what would happen if Lila and Win met. But the possibility of it seemed so far-fetched, like trying to imagine the boulevards of LA cracking open when the Big One hit. Unthinkable. They moved in different orbits. In his own head he never let them touch. He waited for Lila to ask about his turbulent relationship with Whitman Tagore the movie star, but she never brought it up. Eventually he brought it up himself, telling her unprompted about their first week in New York, about their deal, about the way Win made him feel useful and important but sometimes also claustrophobic, like he was caught in a net.

  Lila said, “You could just be like, I don’t want to do it anymore.”

  “But then I’d never see her,” Leo said.

  Lila shrugged, went back to painting his toenails, and changed the subject.

  The band returned to LA in the fall, with twelve completed tracks, several garbage bags full of dirty laundry, and Leo in tow. Leo checked his emails for the first time in months. He hadn’t missed anything important. He called Win on a whim at Alex’s birthday party, barefoot out on the porch among the prickly pear and cigarette butts. She wasn’t entirely tuned in to the conversation, said there was a bit of a shitstorm going on with one of her projects and thanks but I don’t think so, when Leo asked if he could help. He came back inside just as they were lighting candles on the cake, everybody singing “Happy Birthday” at different tempos and with terrible harmonies. It was good not to be needed, he told himself; it was good to go only where he was genuinely wanted. Lila told him that the band was preparing to spend the rest of the autumn on tour. Leo had never lived on the road before. He was curious.

  They rattled off in a van, unspooling months of Leo and Lila rambling across the country together underneath a highway sky. He got used to the dim lighting of basement shows and motel showers. He developed competencies he had not thought possible. He learned how to take apart a drum kit and put it back together again, how to push-start the van, how to hit and hold a low C. He goaded Lila into writing a song about him that she would never record. They indulged each other. Lila picked fights with Alex constantly but with Leo she was lenient, unconcerned. Leo never had to parse his thoughts in his head before he said them out loud. It was cold on the East Coast, and they were forever finding new hidden places to sneak away together and get warm. They talked through sex, as they talked through everything.