by Reiss, CD
I should have answered her tears with kisses, should have held her or said something to cut off the next line, because before it, everything was salvageable.
“Do you love me?” she asked. “Can you honestly say you love me?”
I was too squeezed. Too many things were happening, and all of them closed and locked my heart.
“It’s only been a couple of weeks,” I answered, as if that mattered.
God, what was I thinking? Was I trying to throw her away?
She nodded, her face a mask of stone and ice. She was gone, and I realized I should have said something else. But I couldn’t take it back, even if I wanted to.
“So sensible,” she said.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“I’m sorry.” She stood. “And thank you. Thank you for everything.”
And that was that. The fact that I’d never experienced that before notwithstanding, when a woman said it was done, it was done.
Right.
My head knew the rule, but the heart wasn’t made of electrical sparks and spindly nerves. The heart was a muscle with four rooms, and it flexed and tightened without reason. In the grip of rage, it expanded to push air out of the lungs around it, squeezing out a single word.
“No.”
“Don’t make this hard,” she said. Her eyes were dry. I wasn’t getting another tear out of her.
“Laine. Listen to me.” I didn’t plead. I commanded. My own voice was foreign to me. “I don’t give a rat fuck about Steve, or those pictures, or what anyone thinks. You’re with me, and everyone else is going to have to catch up to that.”
“That’s not the world I live in.”
“You’re in my world now.”
Listening to myself was my job, and I sounded like a fucking asshole. I’d used that tone before—in front of a camera—but for the first time, I knew how good it felt to not just act like that asshole, but to actually be him.
She glanced away as if she couldn’t look at what I heard. “That’ll never be true. I’ll drag you through my world before I ever step foot in yours.”
“Laine,” I said, pointing at her as if she was the problem. My anger didn’t know where to go. I wasn’t used to having so much of it. “Stop the bullshit. Where’s ‘I own this city’? Huh? Where’s that woman? That woman wouldn’t run away. She knows who she is. She. Is. Mine. Accept it. Act like it for fuck’s sake.”
Directing my rage at her wasn’t my last mistake, but it was the stupidest.
She started to turn, and in my mind, I saw her leaving forever.
I took her arm to stop her and she jerked it away, then held up her hands as if stopping an oncoming train. I felt ashamed of how I’d touched her. Even after all the intimacy of the night before, I’d physically overstepped.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That came out wrong.”
“You’re a good man, Michael. You’ll see it’s the best thing.”
She didn’t wait for an answer. She just turned on her high-tops and walked for the door without looking back, head down as if she were looking for dropped change. I didn’t sense that anything had shifted until she fussed with the doorknob, and when I jumped to help her, she put her hand up to keep me away.
“I got it.” She put up her hand. “Just open the gate for me.”
“Gali can be here in three minutes.”
“I’ll get myself a cab.”
“Don’t—”
“It’s not spite, Michael! I want to be alone. I want to do this on my terms. Can you give me that? Can one fucking thing in this shitty life go my way?”
No. Not this. Not if this was the one thing. Anything but this.
But yes. I had to give up what I wanted to give her what she wanted. Today. This one thing, today.
“Okay.”
The sun would rise tomorrow.
“Thank you.”
I opened the door and let her walk out. Today.
She trudged to the front, and just before she got to the gate, she put her chin up, her shoulders back, and walked as though she meant it. I pushed the button and opened the gate so she didn’t have to break her stride, and that too was a mistake.
I was supposed to shut it off like a faucet, as if I’d been acting the whole time.
I hadn’t been. I’d meant everything I ever said to her, and I didn’t know how to un-mean it. But maybe she was right. Maybe I should admire her strength to do what had to be done. I didn’t know how to have a relationship any more than she did. I’d never learned how to work for it. I’d left my name to do the heavy lifting.
My life was my life. It wasn’t changing. Whatever my ability to expose myself while exposing none of myself was, it was something I’d been born into. I couldn’t change it any more than I could make myself shorter. She saw that. She was wise beyond her years and strong beyond her stature.
She was right. It hurt, but she was beautiful, and she was right.
Today.
The sun would rise tomorrow, and I’d be there, waiting for her.
44
laine
Nothing was right. Nothing was exactly wrong, but nothing was right. I had things to figure out, and I didn’t even know what they were. I should have been out getting work, but I wanted to go to bed. Not to lie under the covers—but to sleep so deeply I forgot to dream.
I woke up loving him and knowing he didn’t love me. That made doing the right and honorable thing easier for him and harder for me. I knew immediately why so few people bothered doing what was best for a person they loved—why so many just went where their heart pulled them. Because doing what made sense hurt. I had a physical pain in my chest. Doing the right thing wasn’t supposed to feel like that. It was supposed to be uplifting. But the loss of him… well, the only word I had was pain.
I pulled an ice-crusted container of French vanilla out of the freezer. Maybe I’d just freeze out the sad. I opened the drawer for a spoon, and I stared back at me in black and white.
The problem of that old me was nestled with the spoons.
I took the picture of sixteen-year-old me out of the drawer, ice cream forgotten. Look at that kid. She was tough. She did what she had to. She’d been given nothing and turned it into something.
I didn’t flinch from the photo. That girl had screwed up any chance I’d had at happiness, but she had given me that chance in the first place. I didn’t hide the picture or try to not think about it. She was mine. She was a part of me.
“I forgive you,” I said, then I started crying.
* * *
I think I cried for two days. Two and a half. Normally I viewed every tear shed as a sign of weakness, as a lack of ownership and control. But I gave up on that in the first ten minutes. I’d been through a lot. I’d earned my tears. This snot-shooting, breath-catching blubber was mine, and I deserved it.
Irv called, and I texted back that I was busy. Tom emailed me an invitation to a Razzledazzle show, and I texted back that I couldn’t make it. No one called to tell me who was eating at what restaurant without their underpants.
Sometimes I called up memories of Sunshine and Rover, with their brightly colored everything. I knew they loved me. I had been with them for two years, and I had to be ripped away from them. I remembered the funky smell of the van, sweat and love and something else.
I’d always thought they’d abandoned me, but maybe it was more complex than that. Maybe I shouldn’t have grown up in a van. Maybe they thought I could do better than them. At six and a half, I had no idea what it meant to leave behind someone you loved.
It sucked.
Michael was the only person who could soothe me, the only one who could make my crying stop, but I’d abandoned him. I had no right to call him to comfort me.
But what I could do was look at him. I thought it would hurt to pull up the pictures I’d taken of him, from the loft upstairs to the first pap shot I’d gotten by the valet of the WDE Agency. I’d filed them by how handsome he looked, how h
appy, how engaged he was with the camera. I had one where he was scratching his head and looking pensive, and I stared at it at three in the morning, trying to understand him. I couldn’t. It was just a picture.
In the evening of the third day, I realized I’d stopped crying. I felt clean. I felt powerful again, and though I hadn’t slept, I was wide awake.
So I went to see Razzledazzle at the Thelonius Room. It was so dark I couldn’t see a foot in front of me. Even the foot-high candles didn’t cut through the murk.
“Where have you been?” Tom yelled over the music of the opening band, Spoken Not Stirred.
“Home crying.”
He looked away from his camera. “You?”
“Yeah. You got a problem?”
“You should have called me.”
I shrugged. “I’m sorry. You like doing this. I shouldn’t have distracted you with being a pap.”
He nudged me with his shoulder. We had more to talk about, but Razzledazzle came on. He disengaged to do his job.
I knew enough people around the room to hold conversations, but an hour in, I was alone at the bar, trying to get away from the noise. I ordered a glass of crappy wine from a skinny girl in black jeans. She’d done her hair in a fancy twist, but after hours of serving overpriced lemonade, she looked worn out.
Though I felt strong, I knew it was a moment of weakness when I called Michael.
I hung up when I heard it ring.
My screen flashed with his name a second later.
He still wanted me, but nothing had changed.
I hadn’t expected hurting someone to feel like this. I thought leaving someone behind would be okay, not a big deal, because they didn’t want me anyway, and the person who loves the least has all the power.
But power wasn’t like that at all, even when it was taken for the right reasons. Power came with a flavor of regret I hadn’t tasted before.
If he called again, I’d pick up. We’d talk. I’d ruin him. He’d hate me.
I blocked his number for his own good.
Leaving without saying good-bye, I stalked the streets of downtown, taking pictures of… I didn’t even know what. Corners. Garbage. A broken water main. Doorways. A club let out, and I took pictures of the drunks. I did it the next night, and the night after. I didn’t know what I was doing but avoiding my own sadness, but I was doing something.
45
michael
Gareth, who had wanted to do Bullets more than he wanted to breathe, took Steven leaving pretty well. He called it deathbed perspective and did a few talk shows explaining himself. The studio found a new director who was half as good and twice as fast, and we were back on track, more or less, after another week and a half of shooting with Britt keeping her arms down.
The furor over Laine died down. I called her, but she’d blocked me.
Guess I had that coming.
After a few days, I took her off the accept list, but whenever I saw a pack of paparazzi, I looked for her. I thought about what I’d do if I saw her. Give her that perfect shot or give her the finger, I didn’t know. I alternated between being respecting her for what she did and resenting it.
I pulled onto my street after one of the last days of shooting on Bullets. One, two, three, five paparazzi at the entrance to my driveway. No, six. Six paparazzi on the street, cameras up. Clickclickclick. None were Laine. It was as if she’d disappeared. I couldn’t even find a candid of anyone, anywhere, in any magazine with her byline.
I ignored the paparazzi. I didn’t even wave as I pulled in and closed the gate. Call time on Bullets yesterday had been after sunset, and I needed a shower and a nap, in that order, but Brad’s car was in the drive.
He stood in the doorway of the guest house in his underwear and a tuxedo shirt. I forgot when I’d given him the keys, but he was a welcome sight, even half dressed.
“The fuck?” he said. “Seen the time?”
“It’s eight in the morning. You should be sleeping. At home. In your own house.” I went up the walk and onto the steps of the small house. I was fully surrounded by hedges and walls, but I wanted to get inside and out of sight.
“Dude, these two girls I was with? Started fighting right there. Like, skin under fingernails. I had to go.”
“You could have put pants on.”
“I was going house, to car, to house,” he said. “I drank the beer in the fridge, by the way.”
I waved him off and went inside. Brad slid his nearly bare ass onto a barstool. I dropped my bag onto the counter.
“You want coffee?” I asked. “I have instant.”
“Sure.” He turned the sound up on the little TV. “They’re talking Oscar for you on Cinema City.”
“The ballots haven’t even gone out yet.”
“The posters went up all over the city. You haven’t noticed your face looking down at you?”
All over Los Angeles, before a turkey graced a Thanksgiving table, billboards went up with “For Your Consideration” across the top and a list under it. It was the studios’ way of reminding the industry of the year’s great films and performances while their Oscar ballots were in front of them.
“I don’t even see my face anymore.”
“See it, dude. Overland put, like, seven million into an ad campaign for Big Girls. And they can’t even stand Andrea.”
“It was a miracle they even released it.”
“The miracle was you, asshole. You were a fucking powerhouse in that thing.” He poured water into a cup while he spoke, thinking about not burning himself, the trajectory of the water, putting in enough but not too much.
“Remember in school,” I said, “pouring the tea?”
He laughed. “Oh, man, I felt so bad for you. You couldn’t pour water and talk at the same time.” He put down the pot.
I was amazed by how our minds multitasked only when we didn’t think about it. Like a switch flipping on, Laine popped into my mind again. Whenever I thought of experiencing life firsthand, I thought of her. One day it would stop. One day.
“I can’t do this,” I said, shutting off the TV.
“What’s that mean?”
“I don’t want to be considered. I don’t want an award. I want Laine.”
“Dude. I’m sorry.”
“I’m done.” I slapped my palms on the counter. “I need a break. A something.”
“What’s on your schedule?”
“I’m booked for two years.”
“Fucked up.”
Two more days without her seemed unbearable. Two years of acting as if everything was normal was impossible. Torture myself so everyone would say how nice I was. How amenable. What a professional.
“No. I have nothing,” I said. “I’m burned out. I don’t know what to do with myself, but I have so much to do I can’t even think.”
“You know what we used to do at home when shit got bad? Like when there was too much?” Brad asked.
“Tip cows?”
“Fuck you, that’s the Midwest, asshole. We went on a road trip. Drove up the mountain to look out over shit.”
I whispered, “Road trip.”
It was a ridiculous idea. Absurd. I had one week in August with no work, and the slightest hiccup would fill those days. I couldn’t possibly travel. People counted on me. My new agent would scream. My dad would call me irresponsible. Ken would have to spin it. The press would assume I was on drugs, and the Hollywood machine as a whole would hate me for making them scramble.
That was my world. The world that had eaten Laine alive and spit the bones. She’d said I could never be part of her world, and maybe she was right.
But maybe getting closer would be enough.
It was time to stop overthinking and start doing.
* * *
An hour after Brad left, I was making calls to get out of town. I didn’t know where I was going, except away.
I wanted to go to places where my face was just another face, to do things I’d never done. I’d lea
rned to mountain climb for a movie, but I’d never done it. Not for real. Not on an actual mountain. I’d only acted like a mountain climber and a ski instructor and a race car driver.
If—for one moment—I saw the world through Laine’s eyes, maybe I’d understand why she left. Maybe that would get her back.
On set that night, I told my father what I was doing whether he liked it or not.
“You go after you fulfill your commitments.” He looked at me through the mirror as we both got our makeup done. It was our last day of shooting, and my obligation to my father would be done.
“You’re lucky I’m staying three days to finish this movie,” I said. “I should leave tomorrow.”
“They’d never forgive you.”
“Fuck them.”
He laughed.
* * *
“You’re bailing on Harvey Worth?” Ken asked on the phone as I crossed my property.
I’d avoided making any industry calls until I’d told Gareth I was leaving. Ken was the last of them. I had a ton of stuff to do and no time to do it in, and for once, that felt exciting. “Yeah.”
“He makes a movie once every ten years.”
“My agent mentioned that to me repeatedly,” I said, coming to a garage only my staff had seen the inside of. I jerked the door open.
“You’re going to get killed, kid.”
“Fans don’t care.”
“Fans? You need to make a movie to have fans. I told you, even you need to get hired. Even you need to keep your reputation.”
I was surprised at how dusty the garage was, considering how spotless the staff kept the big house. I found my mountain climbing stuff with a broadsword and shield. I’d learned how to use a nunchaku for a part. I found a box of spray paint. When I was nineteen, I’d played a New York graffiti artist and learned to handle a can of paint.
