The Comeback
Page 17
“I think you’re being very brave,” I say softly to Esme once we’re in the icy water, just before she dives underneath the waves and stays down there for a long time. I think it’s the first time I’ve seen her lost for words.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Dylan answers the door as soon as I ring the bell, before I’ve had enough time to adequately brace myself. I smile nervously as he stands and looks at me for a moment before stepping back to let me in the house.
“How are you doing, Grace?” he says easily.
“Almost, definitely, okay,” I say, and for some reason I also flash him the scuba diving hand signal for okay. His eyes crinkle slightly in response.
I trail my finger across the leaf of a cheese plant we bought as a test to see whether we were allowed to get a dog. It’s still alive, which is something, but I’m not sure how much I had to do with it.
“Do you remember the video camera?” I ask, and Dylan nods. “Do you know where it is? I’m working on a project.”
Dylan breaks into a smile and I have to look away, because of those beautiful fucking teeth.
A couple of years ago I told him about the late-night talk show appearance I’d done when I was seventeen. It was the first one I’d booked where I didn’t feel like a little kid anymore, and I was excited to show everyone how much I’d grown up. I wore a short white dress that, naturally, the host made the audience applaud, before he encouraged a bonus round of applause for my virginity, which he then joked had been insured for $10 million. I squirmed and giggled along with him and, at his encouragement, gently scolded him like he was my naughty little brother instead of what he was: a middle-aged pervert. Afterward, everyone told me how well I did. Once again, I had impressed with my amiability.
After I showed him the clip on YouTube, Dylan went out and bought me the camera. He said I could use it to tell whatever story I wanted, and he never even said anything when it sat untouched in our spare room after that.
“That’s cool. I can’t wait to hear about it,” Dylan says, pausing at the bottom of the stairs. I don’t give him any more information, and he walks off to find it.
I’m waiting by the front door for him, feeling like a stranger in a home that never really felt like my own, when Wren walks out from the kitchen, wearing yoga pants and a loose tank top with the word NamaSLAY printed across it. She is holding a bag of carrot sticks, and I figure she’s just finished working out.
“Hi, sweetie!” she says, kissing me on the cheek. She smells of carrots and hummus, and for just a second it makes my chest hurt because Dylan probably deserves to be with someone who smells of carrots and hummus and does yoga every weekend.
“I was thinking, we should go out soon. Do you want to go out together?” she asks, squinting as she holds up the bag of carrots, reading something.
I stare at her, unsure of what she means. “Like to a club?”
“I’d love that, Grace. Maybe next week?” Wren says as Dylan appears at the top of the stairs. He’s holding a box and wearing an old gray baseball cap with a faded O, for Ohio State, where his brothers all played football.
“You going anywhere good?” I say, a smile breaking across my face because this used to be Dylan’s lucky flying hat. He wouldn’t get on a plane without it even though I used to tease him mercilessly about it. He had hundreds of these little superstitions, things he half believed in as if he didn’t already believe in enough.
He stands at the top of the stairs, smiling down at me, his face half-hidden under the shadow of the brim. Wren is still reading the carrot packaging next to me, and I feel inexplicably irritated by this. I don’t understand what she can be searching for when surely the only ingredient is fucking carrots. She catches me watching her and smiles, offering the bag to me. I take a stick mainly because I can’t be bothered to decline.
“So, Friday?” she says brightly, and I must appear confused because she shakes her head, laughing. “You and me going out.”
Dylan walks down the stairs and stands at the bottom, next to Wren. I wait expectantly but nobody says anything. In the end I reach out and take the box from his hands.
“Grace?” Wren says eventually.
“Great, yeah. Friday,” I say, turning the box over in my hands.
* * *
• • •
I practice using the camera at home, filming in the dark living room. The room is even bleaker on a flat screen. I flip the screen so that it’s facing me, and then I talk into it like I’ve seen the kids on Abbot Kinney do on their phones.
“Hiiiiii, guys, it’s me. I just wanted to tell you about the calorie content of carrots today. Like, everyone thinks carrots are good for you, but in actual fact, do you know how much water is in each carrot you eat? Have you even ever heard of water retention? Because it makes you fat. That’s what water does. Carrots are disgusting,” I say, feeling mean only once I’ve finished.
I walk out onto the porch and hold the camera up to film the ocean. The sunlight flares on the screen like a shot in a Sofia Coppola movie. I wish I knew how to send the clip straight to Dylan, because I think he’d like it.
I hold the camera up, filming a pelican as it plunges into the ocean for fish, when a car door slams behind me. I flip the camera shut because the sound has already ruined the audio of my shot, even though I don’t know what it’s for.
“What are you up to?” Emilia asks, climbing up the porch to me. She is impossibly perfect, her hair the exact color of the sand when the sun hits it.
“Just messing around,” I say, holding the camera by my side protectively. “What’s up?”
“Well . . . my colorist was over and I saw that your car was down here, and I just thought, you know what, I’ll see if Grace wants her roots done too,” Emilia says, smiling innocently at me. I automatically reach for my hair. She must have seen the tabloid photos of me looking like a serial killer.
“Is that your way of telling me I need to get my roots done?”
“Oh, honey, of course not. I’m sure you mentioned your hair last time, and Margot is absolutely the best person in LA to do blondes, and she’s at a loss because she had a last-minute cancellation, which does not happen often, trust me. If I had any inclination to believe in fate, then I think this would be it. She does everyone and she’s an absolute sweetheart. She’s also a healer and will want to talk to you about all her past lives, which obviously I do not believe in, either, but occasionally I do let her read my energy just because it freaks Able out when I tell him. I swear he’s the last person in this city who still semi-believes in God.”
“Where is she?” I ask, the irony of her last statement not escaping me.
“She’s waiting in the car. Can I tell her to come out?” Emilia says, smiling sheepishly, and, of course, she does it all in a way that makes me think it was all my idea and that I’m actually doing them both a huge favor, because everything she does is seamless, designed to make you feel as special as she is. I realize then what an unusual opponent Emilia would be, the type who could slip under your skin when you least expect it.
* * *
• • •
Margot has a shaved bleached head and a tiny white tattoo of a shell in between her clavicles, right in the tender part that I will barely let anyone touch, let alone tattoo.
“What are you going to do to my hair?” I ask her as Emilia rushes around my house, pulling up a chair for me to sit on next to the kitchen sink and propping the dirty mirror from the bedroom in front of us, just in case I want to stare at my own puffy face for two hours.
“Oh, I forgot you’re really British! Are you from London?” Margot asks as she runs her fingers through my hair. It’s the most intimate I’ve been with anyone for a while, and it’s making me feel embarrassingly turned on.
“North London. Have you been?” I ask, shifting in my seat as she clips the top half of my hair up.
“I was a member of the Auxiliary Ambulance Service there in the Second World War. During the Blitz,” Margot says seriously, saying the Blitz in an English accent.
I’m working out how to respond when Emilia turns around, and our eyes catch in the mirror. We’re both trying not to laugh, and for a moment it feels like we’re old friends. My face heats up and I realize that this is something else I never learned, how friendship alone can make you feel safe.
“Right. Okay,” I say eventually. “That would be in another lifetime, I assume?”
“Of course. Another lifetime, another vessel.”
I make a noise that I hope sounds like I’m agreeing with her, thinking that if there’s any truth to what she’s saying, I better come back as a man next time, one who believes he can do anything, regardless of whether it’s true or not. I stop asking her questions, though, because while I can see how believing in some higher power or grand plan could be comforting, it still makes me feel sorry for her and for all of us for needing it.
“So, talk to me. What were you going for with this?” Margot says, holding up a chunk of my hair. The reddish root nearly reaches the tops of my ears now, followed by about five inches of yellow blond, ending just above my shoulders.
“Where was I going?”
“What was the desired result? You must have been trying to say something.”
“It’s bad, isn’t it?” I say, noticing how greasy the roots are again.
“It’s less a hairstyle than a cry for help,” Margot says, and Emilia, who has been keeping busy arranging a bunch of flowers that have miraculously appeared from somewhere, does laugh this time. “Do you trust me to fix it?”
“I don’t think I care enough to have to trust you,” I say honestly, because I’m not sure I could ever trust anyone who has a tattoo in the most vulnerable part of their body, or who believes that maybe we were once all just mosquitoes, a thousand lives ago.
* * *
• • •
Emilia makes a pot of tea and stands behind me. She watches Margot closely, and they both use familiar words in unfamiliar contexts when referring to my hair. After enough cools and icys to sink the Titanic, I slump lower in the chair, drifting off only to wake up feeling surprised that I felt comfortable enough to sleep in front of these women.
Emilia is murmuring something to Margot, so I keep my eyes closed.
“I don’t know what happened with him. I’ve been meaning to ask her. She obviously can’t live here forever.”
“She has a good spirit,” Margot says as she massages my hair with bleach, pulling it through to the ends.
“She’s a very smart girl,” Emilia says, and the pride in her voice makes me feel prickly and guilty, so I wriggle a bit and then stretch, opening my eyes and blinking a couple of times like the Golden Globe–nominated actress I am. Neither Emilia nor Margot seems embarrassed to have been caught talking about me. Emilia leans forward and offers me some more tea, made with fresh mint from Morocco. I have one sip before I place the cup on the countertop and somehow fall asleep again.
* * *
• • •
Margot taps me gently on the shoulder, and I open my eyes. Emilia is back by my side, and they are beaming at me like proud parents. My entire head is white and crisp with thick, crumbling bleach. I blink, looking between the two women in the mirror, unsure of what exactly is happening. It’s getting dark outside.
“Stand up then!” Emilia says, so I do. She whips my chair around and I sit back down, tipping my head into the kitchen sink under her instruction. Margot turns on the water and starts to rinse my hair, stroking it softly with her other hand as she sings something quietly. The water is warm and I have to fight to keep my eyes open again, slightly embarrassed that I seem to have turned into a narcoleptic.
Margot notices my embarrassment and smiles at me. “It’s my energy. People fall asleep around me all the time.”
I’m back in my chair a few minutes later, facing the mirror as Margot rubs something earthy-smelling into my hair. I can already see that my hair is now white blond up to the root, even though it’s sopping wet. I hold a strand and twist it around my finger, trying not to smile. Emilia has disappeared out onto the porch, apologizing profusely before taking a phone call.
“Do you like it?” Margot asks, grinning at me in the mirror. I run my fingers through it, and it feels softer than ever before, even slightly oily.
“It matches your spirit now. You have a lioness guarding everything you do, did you know that?”
I shake my head, knowing that it’s just bullshit LA talk, so it has to be the acrid smell of the bleach making my eyes fill with tears.
“Lions are the most courageous of all the spirit animals. They will fight relentlessly to protect you if they need to.”
I swallow as Margot straightens up and puts her hand on my shoulder.
“We’ll take you back to your natural color next time, but right now you need a blond moment,” she says.
“A Marilyn moment,” I say, frowning at my reflection as water drips down the back of my neck.
“I was thinking more a Courtney Love moment. Actually, shit—it’s your Kurt Cobain moment,” Margot says, grinning at me. She has a gold tooth that I didn’t notice before.
She leans forward and speaks softly in my ear. “I know that somebody hurt you. Now it’s time for you to fuck shit up, baby lion.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
For a while now, I’ve had this ninety-minute rule. I never spend longer than ninety minutes in someone else’s company, whether that’s for a work meeting, an interview with a teen magazine or just hanging out with someone at a party. I think that it’s easy to pretend to be someone for ninety minutes, but after that you can’t help but let your guard down. Maybe you tell a revealing story about your childhood or about a weird dream you had the other night; whatever it is, you end up exposing too much of yourself. Dylan is one of two people I ever spent more than ninety minutes with outside of a movie set, and the other is Able. Ninety minutes is the maximum amount of time I can pretend to be Grace Turner, and after that it’s anyone’s guess.
Despite my rule, when Emilia invites me back up to hers for a drink after Margot has left, I can’t think of a single reason not to. It’s Saturday night and my rental feels even bleaker than before the two women arrived, as if the echoes of laughter will now be reverberating off the bare walls around me, mocking me.
We sit in Emilia’s kitchen and she pours some vodka into a glass, topping it up with soda water and elderflower cordial. She leaves the vodka out of mine, and I know that she noticed my full glass of wine from the other day and figured it out.
“I’ve actually been thinking about you a lot, and not just your hair,” Emilia says, once she’s settled opposite me. Then she lets out a peal of laughter when she sees my face and misunderstands. “Not like that. God, I wish? Wouldn’t that be a story. No, I’ve realized that I never did ask what happened between you and Dylan.”
I pause, unsure of what to say that wouldn’t reveal too much of myself to her.
“I don’t exactly know,” I say slowly, buying time before deciding to use my old interview technique of lightly skimming the truth so that my words still feel authentic. “I think what mattered in the end was that I wasn’t who he thought I was, and he was exactly who I thought he was.”
In a way, it is sort of the whole truth, but Emilia is still waiting, her head tilted to one side. I remember now that she was a reporter for years.
“He wanted me to be someone I couldn’t be. I could never live up to his perfect vision because I’d had . . . a life before him,” I finish quickly, because I don’t know what else I can say.
Emilia studies me for a moment.
“Well, isn’t that just the most absurdly male quality,” she says finally. “So you weren’t saving yourself for Dyl
an. They always want to be the first to discover anything. They want to be Christopher Columbus or Neil Armstrong. They want to stick a flag in it and own it.”
I look at her, surprised by her tone, and I can tell that she wants a back-and-forth, but the pressure of it all, of having this conversation with the only other woman who may have been able to stop it all if she’d known, is paralyzing.
“I have trust issues,” I say lamely, wiping my palms on my jeans.
“Don’t we all,” Emilia says lightly, but before either of us can dwell on it, she’s speaking again. “And what’s happening with work? Are you looking for your next project?”
I shrug, avoiding meeting her gaze. Emilia seems frustrated with my ineptitude, and I have to work harder to pretend I don’t care than I do with most people. I know that she’s trying to understand exactly what happened to me, but it’s the one thing I can’t tell her. I need to take control of the conversation, but I can never seem to find the right thing to say around her.
“Grace, I know it seems like I’m being nosy, but I just can’t help but feel like we’re similar in so many ways, and that I could help you. I’ve been where you are now, and sometimes when I look at you, I see your vulnerability so clearly that it rattles my insides, do you know what I mean?”
“I guess so,” I say as Emilia’s pale eyes stare into mine.
“You know, I never said I’m sorry,” she says, blinking for a moment, as if to dismiss an unpleasant memory. “I told your parents that I would look after you, but I didn’t. Everything after the twins were born is a little . . . hazy. If I’m being honest, it was a shock that none of it came easily to me, and I just had to focus on getting through each day for a while. But you were too young to be alone, and I shouldn’t have made a promise I couldn’t keep. So I am. Sorry, I mean.”