Inside

by Alix Ohlin

  “When you love someone,” Diane said, her lips trembling, “you don’t tell them their script sucks. You give them some notes. You point to a particular detail that you do like. You say, I think it’s got potential but it’s not quite there yet. That’s what you say if you aren’t some robot or a person who was raised in a barn.”

  “I’m sorry,” Anne said, taking her hand, but Diane left the house and didn’t come back that night and this was their first fight, ever.

  It upset her more than she would’ve anticipated. She felt off-balance, almost nauseated, and couldn’t sleep, and the next day the makeup girl tutted and shook her head at the dark circles under her eyes. This made her mad at Diane, so instead of going back to her place after they stopped shooting, she went back to her own. She had been spending so much time at Diane’s that she’d practically forgotten she still had the little cottage. She had no stuff there anymore, not even a toothbrush, and compared to Diane’s house it was barren. The hulking villa loomed over her cottage, its emptiness both sterile and ominous. There was life in Los Feliz, people walking their dogs, crowding the parking lot at Trader Joe’s, chatting and drinking tea under the umbrellas at the Alcove Café. Anne missed all of this, and Diane most of all, and in the cottage she felt shabby and exiled.

  They made up two days later. Anne invented some positive comments on the script, and Diane admitted that she was better at cajoling work out of others than doing it herself. They drank a bottle of wine, then went to bed and found each other again, newly tender. The fight had given texture to their relationship: they had admitted how much they cared, and now things were deeper, stranger, stronger.

  Giving up on the script, Diane got a job at an independent production company, and they took a weekend trip to Palm Springs to celebrate. At a restaurant one night, a woman who knew Diane approached their table to say hello, and Diane said, “This is my girlfriend,” and Anne realized that it was true. She was surprised—not about being with a woman, or even about being a girlfriend. The surprising part was how much she liked it.

  Shooting wrapped a week later, and now the long pause began as the pilot was edited and presented to the network. In the meantime, Anne became what Diane called “a kept woman.” She had signed a contract that forbade her from working elsewhere until a decision was reached on the show. She worked, instead, on being Diane’s girlfriend. Every day she asked her about her job, the minor details and ongoing disputes. Diane’s work stories were the world’s most boring soap opera, but Anne never let on how she felt. As always, once she started playing a part, she started being the part, finding aspects of herself that she hadn’t known were there. She could grow into it, even things that were really a stretch, like knowing which of Diane’s two bosses she was talking about; they were both named Jim, and Diane never mentioned their last names, differentiating between them only by tone—one Jim she liked, the other she despised.

  Anne was good at this, and Diane responded like a plant to careful tending. She almost immediately got a promotion and gave her the credit for it, though Anne couldn’t remember giving her any advice; in fact she rarely did, instead just parroting back Diane’s own opinions.

  In the middle of all this, on a Tuesday night, Adam called and invited her out to dinner. “Just you,” he said. “Tell Di it’s a work thing.”

  Diane said, “Is he going to feel your tits again?”

  “Hopefully not at the restaurant.”

  “At least be discreet.”

  “Hey,” Anne said, “whatever it takes to get ahead.”

  Diane punched her arm lightly, then held her close. “Be careful,” she said.

  At an expensive Italian restaurant on Melrose, Adam ordered champagne, poured it, sniffed it, so obviously and pathetically milking the suspense that Anne could barely keep from rolling her eyes. Obviously the pilot had been picked up.

  He raised his glass and nodded for her to do the same. “Congratulations, beautiful,” he said. “They chose us.”

  They chose me, she wanted to say, but didn’t. “That’s amazing,” she said. “I can’t believe it.”

  Adam narrowed his eyes. “I expected more squealing, maybe a mad dash around the restaurant, shots at the bar. What’s wrong with you?”

  Anne played the dumbfounded ingénue. “I think it hasn’t sunk in yet,” she said. “I can’t even believe it. When will it run?”

  “Well, hold on,” he said. “There are still more hoops to get through.”

  This discussion took them through appetizers and the first bottle of champagne. By the second, they were both drunk. When Adam ordered dessert, she knew another announcement was coming.

  “I’m sure you know what’s next,” he said over flourless chocolate cake. “It’s time for you to get out of your thing with Diane.”

  “What? Why should I do that?”

  “Until the pilot got picked up, nobody cared, but once you’re on the air, they’re going to be taking pictures of you at the grocery store. I know what you’re thinking, this is the twenty-first century, but trust me on this. I don’t want to see ‘Anne Hardwick and gal pal at Starbucks’ in Life & Style magazine. You’re a sex symbol on this show. A straight sex symbol. Also, any embarrassing trips you need to take, any doctor’s appointments, any purchases you don’t want people to know about, now is the time.”

  “But I’m not …” She had been about to say “gay,” then realized how idiotic it sounded. She had no idea how she could explain, in a phrase or two, that this was just about her and one particular person, that it was strange and unexpected and highly specific.

  “You’re not Jodie Foster, is what you’re not,” Adam said. “Time to deal.”

  Diane was waiting up, and from the look on her face it was clear she’d already guessed what had happened. Anne stood in the living room in her celebration dress, the most expensive she’d ever owned. To dissolve the relationship explicitly would require a more direct conversation than they had ever had about starting it. Diane started crying, and Anne couldn’t listen to that, not right now. “Let’s just go to bed,” she said.

  Diane nodded, looking relieved. She gave a lopsided smile, then took Anne by the hand and led her to bed. They didn’t do anything, just lay there holding hands, not talking.

  In the morning, Diane was firm and calm, everything Anne could’ve wanted her to be, and she hated her for it. Diane handed her a cup of coffee and said, “If I were Adam, I’d want the same thing. They’ve made an investment in you, and they don’t like risks. That’s how the business works. Why don’t you take the first shower?”

  When Anne came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, her clothes were packed in a suitcase by the door and Diane was laying out an outfit for her on the bed. Anne looked at her and said, “You’re sure about this?”

  Diane shrugged wordlessly. Anne felt a slight sense of relief—that they’d agreed, that there’d be no scenes. “Okay, then,” was all she said. They didn’t even kiss good-bye.

  Back at the cottage, Anne burst into racking sobs and wound up hunched over the toilet, throwing up, Diane’s coffee bitter in her throat. Wrecked, she crawled under the covers and woke up an hour later, her skin parched and itchy. Trying to distract herself, she poured body lotion on her legs, arms, stomach. One thing led to another and she made herself come, thinking about Diane touching her, and then she cried again.

  She joined a gym and got Adam to hire her a personal trainer, who put her on a diet so restricted and confusing that she spent most of her time shopping for the peculiar ingredients; the rest of the time, low blood sugar made her feel too weak to think clearly about anything, even Diane. One day at the gym, she was drinking a shot of wheatgrass at the juice bar when a guy said, “Hey, you don’t look so good.”

  “Then why are you talking to me?” she said.

  “I didn’t mean to insult you,” he said. “It just looks like you worked out a little too hard. You look like you could use a steak.”

  Anne picked u
p her bag and slid off her stool. As she did, she almost fainted; spots crossed her vision, and she had to lean against the counter for balance. The guy grabbed her arm, his muscles rippling. He was wearing a blue T-shirt and Adidas sweatpants and she said, “Yeah, I probably need some meat,” which made him smile.

  Two hours later they were back at her place, in bed. There was so much she had forgotten—the roughness and heft of a man, his smell and force. She never even asked him his name.

  So began a period of sleeping around, of dates in restaurants, of men in bars. A dentist, a studio executive, a chef, another studio executive, a Pilates instructor, and the original gym guy, whom she ran into at the juice bar from time to time. She finally learned his name—Neal—and got him to take her to a restaurant where she and Diane used to go, whose food she missed, and then back to the cottage. They were dozing in bed around eleven when somebody started banging on the door.

  It was Diane, and she was weeping and drunk. “You cunt,” she said.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Fuck you. I’m here to call you a whore.”

  Neal, hearing voices, came out wearing boxers and holding his cell phone. Anne wondered if he was going to call the police, or ask Diane if she wanted a steak. A good protein source was his answer to everything.

  “Well, now you have,” Anne said. “So I guess you can go.”

  “You’re a coldhearted bitch,” Diane said. “You had to fucking sleep with guys from my office. I had to hear about this in meetings. You couldn’t at least do me the decency of whoring outside the entertainment industry?”

  “Everybody out here works in the entertainment industry,” Anne said.

  “I don’t,” Neal said.

  “Who the fuck are you?” Diane said.

  “I’m Neal.”

  “Sorry,” Anne said. “Diane, Neal.”

  “Is this your boyfriend? Do you already have a boyfriend?”

  “Is this your girlfriend?” said Neal, an edge of interest in his voice.

  It was too much. Anne started laughing—it was hysterical laughter, not genuine, but the only person who knew her well enough to recognize this was Diane, and she was lost to her now.

  Diane was sobbing. She reeked of alcohol and perfume. Anne could picture it perfectly: she had taken a bath, drunk a bottle of wine, trying to soothe herself, and wound up in a fit instead. Only the image of Diane’s naked body, slick with soap, enabled Anne to stop laughing and calm down.

  “Diane,” she said gently. “Go home.”

  Sometimes at night her skin ached for Diane, and the only cure for this was to have somebody else in bed with her. Hence Neal became a regular. They worked out and slept together a few days a week. It wasn’t a relationship; it was exercise. Neal bought her gifts: a notebook so she could write down what she ate every day, a heart-rate monitor, a juicer. It didn’t seem to bother him that she bought him nothing in return. But when his parents came to town, he wanted her to meet them. She would have understood if he’d said that he wanted them to see her, to show her off. But he actually wanted them to meet so that she could get to know him better.

  “No, thanks,” she said.

  “Man,” he said, “you really are this cold. My friends thought I was making it up.”

  “You’ve never complained before.”

  “I should’ve listened to that Diane. Are you, like, autistic? My friends said you were the perfect woman. Sex and a workout partner without any obligations. But that’s, like, weird.” When he got worked up, Neal sounded like a teenage girl.

  “If it really means a lot to you,” she said half-heartedly, “I’ll go to dinner.”

  “No, that’s okay,” he said. “I don’t want to put you out.”

  This, for them, was a long conversation. He wasn’t much of a talker, just a teddy bear of physical perfection, something to hold in the night. She’d thought he might be the ideal man, but he was letting her down now. He went around the apartment gathering up the juicer, the heart-rate monitor, the pedometer watch. She understood; it was expensive stuff, he could sell it or use it himself. He wasn’t made of money.

  Standing in the doorway, he said, “You aren’t even upset, are you?”

  “I’m not sure why you think I should be.”

  “The thing is, if you never get upset over anything, doesn’t that mean you just don’t give a shit?”

  Anne looked at him, glad they’d never tried having conversations before. “I guess so.”

  “And if you never mourn for anything you lose, doesn’t that mean that nothing in your life’s worth anything?”

  Anne raised her chin. “Life insights from the gym guy,” she said. “Workout for your soul along with your body and mind.”

  “Okay, you mock.” He touched her cheek. “I’m not Diane; I’m not so heartbroken. But I’m not spending much longer around you, either. I don’t want to turn into a robot. You take care. Don’t forget to eat your protein.”

  With those last romantic words, it was over.

  In her mind, she mocked him relentlessly. But what he said about mourning she knew to be true, because she was alone and thinking about Diane, and about Hilary’s baby being born without her even knowing where or when. Eat your protein. Didn’t he know she’d been trying? She wanted to eat protein, eat muscles and blood, even her own heart, until nothing, not a single ounce, was left.

  The night the pilot aired, she watched it with fifty people at the director’s house in the Hollywood Hills. Anne stood outside until the last possible moment, bumming cigarettes from one of her costars, then someone opened the plate-glass doors, said it was starting, and dragged her inside.

  To her the pilot looked embarrassing and lame, like a high-school talent show. The pulsing techno music of the theme, the way her mouth pursed in puzzlement as she stared into the distance. Watching this, she ran her tongue over her lips, lush and protuberant from chemical injections, and turned away. It felt like she was masturbating in front of the whole room.

  She went back outside, ignoring everyone’s encouraging shouts. For the first time she started wondering about the future. They had filmed three episodes and had a contract for ten more, though she’d been cautioned that the network could pull the plug at any moment. By now she had heard this so often that she assumed that’s what would happen. The idea that it wouldn’t—that this was her life now—felt even more frightening than failure.

  Julia was calling all the time these days, but Anne had a new L.A. agent, Molly Senak, who kept sending her scripts for movies she could shoot once the season was over. The parts were always the hooker who dies, the girlfriend who walks away in the early scenes, the cheating temptation for the flawed hero. “Places to shine in small ways,” Molly called them, the building blocks of a certain kind of career.

  She missed New York—not the life itself so much as its familiar sense of difficulty and want. And more often than she would have imagined, she also found herself thinking about even more distant times in Montreal. Her father she refused to think about, but her mother sometimes wafted into her thoughts, along with memories of their house, her old room, even her therapist, who she realized now was the closest thing she’d had to a friend back then. Trying to boost her confidence, Grace had once told her to pretend she was a star, that she was all grown up with the life of her dreams. She wondered if any of them would see the show. If they’d be proud.

  She left the party fifteen minutes after the director turned off his enormous TV and broke out the champagne. Back at the cottage, she listened to the message Diane had left, stiffly congratulating her. She felt an agonizing twist of pity and longing at the sound of her voice, but set it aside. She set it aside every day, and each time it was easier, more automatic, less twisting.

  Reviews were bad; ratings were good. She filmed the new episodes, working sixteen-hour days, and perfected the art of the sudden nap; at any moment she’d lie down on the couch in her dressing room and drop off. She was sleeping
one day when a PA knocked on the door and came in. She was a twenty-year-old UCLA dropout, timid and lithe. Anne couldn’t remember her name.

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” she said.

  Anne yawned. “What is it?”

  “There’s a call for you,” she said, “that got forwarded from the production office.” She held out a phone. “I wasn’t sure what to do, but this woman’s been calling, first the network and then the producers. She’s very resourceful, and really pushy. On the one hand it’s probably a crazy person but I just thought, what if it’s not? What if she’s telling the truth and I didn’t tell you? I hope you aren’t mad.”

  Anne stared at her blankly and took the phone without giving it much thought.

  “I’m really sorry,” the PA said. “It’s just, you know, I wasn’t sure what to do. She says she’s your sister.”

  “I don’t have a sister,” Anne said. She weighed the phone in her hand, then hung up.

  A week later the girl came by Anne’s trailer again and stood in front of her so long that she had to say something, if only out of impatience.

  “I haven’t seen you for a while,” she said. “Everything okay?”

  The PA’s face wrinkled. “I’ve been here. I think you just didn’t see me.”

  Anne rolled her eyes. “I’m self-involved, but I’m not blind.”

  The PA nodded, apparently taking this as a statement of fact instead of the joke Anne had intended. Then someone swooped in to reapply her makeup, blocking the girl from view, but Anne heard her say, “Anyway, I’m really, really sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “I brought you this,” the PA said, producing a manila envelope from her messenger bag and handing it to her.

  Anne stared at it, having no idea what it was.

  “It’s your fan mail,” the girl said. Her walkie-talkie crackled and she turned to leave.

  As the stylist kept working, Anne glanced at the letters. It was her first fan mail ever: young girls, middle-aged women, boys asking her to their proms, convicts, men promising they’d leave their wives in a heartbeat if she’d meet them for a drink, they really felt like there was some kind of special connection there, two hearts that could beat as one. If you wanted to feel optimistic about the human race, fan letters to a TV star were not the place to start. She flipped through the stack, not thinking she was looking for anything in particular, until she saw it. A letter postmarked Utica, New York, with Anne’s name written in the bubbly, curly penmanship of a teenage girl.