by Emma Dibdin
‘I’ve admired Clark’s work for a long time,’ I reply, cringing inwardly at how inadequate this seems, how formulaic. ‘Getting the assignment to interview him was very exciting. It was a dream, really. And then— I mean, that day ended the way it ended. And now…’ I trail off, lamely. There is nothing in any of this to explain why I’m still around, in Clark’s life and in hers, except that I asked and he said yes. ‘Things got complicated. And I didn’t feel like I could just walk away, after what happened.’
‘And what did happen?’ she asks quietly, her opaque blue bug eyes fixed out towards the ocean, reflecting rolling waves.
‘I think that’s for you to say. If you want to. If you want to talk about it.’
‘Why would I talk to you about that?’
This is a fair question, and I tell her so.
‘I’m getting tired,’ she says next. I am too, in truth; Venice is too hot and too crowded, and the constant need to dodge cyclists and stoners is draining. We duck into the shade of a graffiti-laden side street, where she offers me a cigarette.
‘No, thanks.’
‘You don’t smoke?’
I shake my head.
‘You’re pretty skinny, so I figured you did.’
This passes for a compliment from Skye.
‘Nope. I used to, but now it’s just good genes.’ A hilarious lie, but I’m not about to reveal my true past to Skye: a chubby kid, started losing weight at fifteen and then never stopped, spent four months in a treatment centre before finally finding a way to eat without wanting to die, and now I’m just fine. Provided I eat within my limitations.
‘Is that why you smoke?’ I ask her, wondering if this may be our elusive common ground. ‘To keep weight off?’
She shrugs, then gives me a sudden megawatt smile. ‘Can’t do coke any more, so…’ Once again, I can’t tell if she’s joking. She tells me again that she’s tired and wants to head home, and I do my best to hide my disappointment.
‘Are you going to the Oscars?’ she asks me as we walk a few blocks inland, following Lenny towards where a car is waiting to take Skye who knows where. Maybe back to Laurel Canyon, maybe to some hidden gem in a hip, rapidly gentrifying part of town where she will slip into a booth with a group of her closest Instagram model friends and talk in hushed, hysterical tones about the weirdo she was just forced to spend an hour with.
‘I’m not sure.’ I don’t have an assignment to cover the Oscars yet; I left my enquiry emails too late and now all of my usual editors have already figured out who they’re sending, and it’s too late now for me to apply for press accreditation. ‘I think your dad’s going to win, though.’
‘Really?’ This is the most animated she’s looked since we met, her words quicker and sharper. ‘He wants it so much. He won’t show it, but it’s everything to him, especially now.’
I am not the only one who felt Clark was robbed at the Globes, and in the days since then the tide has turned in his favour, according to the pundits who make such predictions.
‘He won the SAG, he’s won almost every critics’ prize going – I just can’t see him losing it,’ I tell her.
‘I hope you’re right.’
Once she’s in the car, she winds down the window and removes her shades for the first time, fixing me with her piercing grey eyes. I want nothing more than to yank the door open and jump into the car beside her, and be whisked back along the freeway and up into the winding, spiralling hills of the canyon, back to that house that has become a permanent fixture in my dreams. But instead she raises her palm in a kind of frozen wave, and then the car is moving and gone and I’m still here, on the outside, the sun on my face suddenly vicious.
11
I watch Clark win his Oscar from a quote-unquote dive bar in West Hollywood, wedged into a corner trying in vain to hear his speech over the din surrounding me. I did not plan on watching the ceremony with a crowd, but the cockroaches have finally taken the upper hand in our ongoing war, and over the past week I’ve found multiple dead baby roaches scattered around the apartment, like a harbinger of something.
‘Means they’re breeding indoors,’ the exterminator told me, his face permanently half-twisted in a way that befits his profession. ‘When you see the infants.’
‘That’s bad news, right?’
‘It’s not good.’ Evidently the landlord isn’t paying him enough to even try to sugarcoat the truth. ‘Gotta bomb the whole place, then put down boric acid.’ The upshot is, I had to leave my apartment and can’t return until at least four hours have passed, at which point I have to open every window and door for ventilation. Which is how I ended up here, missing most of Clark’s words and watching Twitter to try to piece together what he’s saying, finally giving up and elbowing my way through the crowd to get right underneath the screen, craning my neck to hear.
‘There are so many people who share in this moment, so many people without whom I would never have even gotten to this room, never mind this stage,’ Clark is saying now, a little breathless, running through the requisite list of agents, managers, producers, co-stars, executives, Neil Armstrong for his extraordinary spirit and story.
‘Most of all, I have to thank my beautiful daughter Skye, my angel, whose courage and humanity is an inspiration to me every day. This one’s for you, honey.’ He raises the award high above his head as though saluting Skye, and I wonder whether she’s watching this from her wing in the canyon, smiling placidly, maybe with tears in her eyes.
Amabella is significantly absent both from his speech and from the ceremony. Rumours began to swirl over the weekend: that she wouldn’t be attending the Oscars, that she and Clark were spotted in a heated argument outside Equinox, that she’s laying low after plastic surgery that left her with unexpected bruising, that Skye hates Amabella and gave her father an ultimatum, that Clark and Carol are reuniting. All of it and none of it may be true, but I’m choosing to believe that this is the beginning of the end. Six months is far longer than he should have ever have spent with her.
Things are looking up for Clark, and for me as well. After agonizing for an entire day over the wording of my email, I finally pitched my Ben Schlattman profile to Reel, and the editor responded much more quickly than I expected asking for more details, then responded again with a yes, a deadline and a fee. I know I should negotiate the latter, but it’s already more money than I’ve made for a single piece in my life, and David, the editor, signed off his last email with another carrot: ‘FYI, we might also want to use some of this in-book for the March 4 edition.’ Meaning my profile, or some edited part of it, could be in the print magazine. A first.
As I was transcribing both parts of my interview with Schlattman, I had to focus on forgetting the actual experience of those conversations, and forgetting what happened in that room at the Montage. Nothing happened, in truth, but that’s not the way it feels, and so typing up our conversation from breakfast felt like watching myself from afar, about to walk into a trap. There’s a niggling sense in me that my first major profile for a Hollywood trade – and potentially my first ever piece in print – will always be sullied now, by something indefinable and dark and beyond my control. Schlattman only agreed to do the interview once he’d met me at the Globes afterparty, when I was a little drunk and eager to impress and wearing that dress, and now it’s clear that was an audition of sorts. ‘He’s been stonewalling us,’ David had said in his first email response to me, clearly impressed that I had persuaded Schlattman to talk, but it’s not because I made him a pitch he couldn’t refuse.
There’s been a voice in my head all along telling me hardboiled truisms, things like nobody ever got ahead in this business by having scruples, and since I know I did nothing wrong in that hotel room, over the course of this week it’s become easier to stop obsessing. Ben Schlattman’s appetites do not make him any less compelling as an industry figure, and they don’t put a dent in the pay cheque I’m going to get for this piece, nor in the prestige its publicati
on will get me. And dissatisfied though I was with the Nest piece, it’s turned out to be a decent calling card purely by virtue of Clark’s name and unicorn status. I’ve sent out a slew of pitch emails cold to editors this week, people I’ve never met before, and they went less ignored than usual. One of them actually commissioned me, and a second said he’d be back in touch next month. Things are moving, it feels like, finally.
Idyllwilde takes Best Picture, and I slip out of the bar just as Ben Schlattman is emerging onto the stage with his fellow producers, averting my eyes and ordering a Lyft ride home. Even the roach graveyard that awaits me is preferable to watching Schlattman in HD.
But I should have waited, because now my eastward ride home coincides directly with the end of the Oscars, and with the requisite one-mile-radius of traffic hell. A maze of police perimeters and flash bulbs that stretches a full fifteen blocks, or so my driver tells me as he makes a sharp U-turn, trying to circumvent the chaos. ‘It’s like crossing the border,’ he says, ‘bomb squads, ID checks, helicopters, everything. I used to drive a limo, I worked the Oscars, the Grammys, the Globes – drove some pretty big people over the years. Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck, Cuba Gooding Jr, Christina Aguilera…’
‘Really?’ I ask, trying to sound impressed. ‘Why did you give it up?’
‘Big people, bigger problems,’ he says with a shrug, and doesn’t elaborate. I wonder if he’s spent the night longing to cross that border as much as I have, or whether given enough time inside you really can become inured to it.
My phone vibrates in my hand, and I realize with a jolt that Clark has responded to the brief, breezy congratulations email I sent him barely ten minutes ago.
Hi Jessica – thanks, it’s been quite a night! Headed to a little shindig in Beverly Hills, love to see you there if you can make it.
C.C.
At the end of his email is an address.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I say immediately to my driver, ‘change of plans. Can we turn around?’
I give him the most generous tip I’ve ever given, to assuage my guilt about forcing him to make a U-turn back into the mayhem. It was worth it, though, to be here. The address Clark gave me turns out to be a nondescript door on an immaculate street that looks like a loading entrance, but when I ring the bell a suited man answers. There is no line of people, no velvet rope, no bouncers with iPads, but something tells me that I’m in the right place, something about the plush interior that I can see just behind the suit’s shoulder, the single silver elevator that promises an ascent. I give him my name, certain that I’m about to be refused entry, already bracing for the rejection as he disappears, but after a moment he reopens the door and smiles and waves me in. Some indefinable string has been pulled, and I am inside.
The elevator whisks me seventeen storeys up to an outdoor rooftop, softly illuminated by gas lamps and furnished like an indoor space, with couches and ottomans and end tables. The crowd is sparse, deliberately so; there are maybe a hundred people here and most of them not recognizable faces, though I’m not paying much attention. There is only one face I’m looking for, and yet when he appears out of the half-darkness and strides towards me I’m still not prepared. All suits look alike to me, but the one Clark is wearing skims his lean silhouette, making him taller and broader and sharper, his hair tousled with flecks of silver visible through the dark, the angles of his face devastating in the firelight.
‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ he says, beaming, and pulls me into a hug, and though his grip is loose suddenly I’m breathless.
‘Me too.’
He leads me over to the bar and orders us two Old Fashioneds, because he remembers this is my drink without having to ask.
‘Where’s Amabella?’ I ask innocently, as though I’m unaware of the rumour mill. As though I have no particular interest in his relationship.
‘She’s not here.’
I suppress a smile.
‘Skye couldn’t make it either tonight, but she’d love to see you,’ he tells me when we’re settled at a high table, facing outwards towards the party. ‘She really enjoyed the other day.’
‘Really?’ I ask before I think better of it. ‘I mean, that’s great – I’m glad. I did too.’
He laughs a little, almost to himself.
‘You don’t have to be polite. I know she can be… difficult.’
‘No, no, she honestly wasn’t. I just wasn’t sure if I was doing any good, or whether she really wanted to be there.’
‘It’s often hard to tell whether she wants to be anywhere.’
He looks haunted at this, as though his own words have startled him, and there is nothing in this moment that I wouldn’t do to make him feel better.
‘I loved your speech. I bet she did, too.’ I look around then, realizing that I don’t even know what afterparty this is. ‘Are the rest of the cast here, the director?’
‘No, I made my appearance at the official thing, but it was crawling with press and I just didn’t have it in me. No offence.’
‘None taken. Journalists are the worst.’
‘Actually, it wasn’t them that bothered me so much as all the people wanting to congratulate me. Is that strange for me to say?’
‘On the night you won an Oscar? Maybe a little bit.’
‘I’m sure I’ll wake up tomorrow morning and be hungry for attention again – which, as you know, is the natural state of most actors. But somehow tonight it just felt odd to me. All these strangers and near-strangers, being so kind and so gracious and so grateful, as though I’d actually done something for them. When acting is one of the most selfish things you can possibly do with your life.’
‘I don’t know about that.’
‘Convince me otherwise.’
‘I’m not here to flatter your ego,’ I tell him. ‘I think you know acting is valuable. Fiction is valuable. Storytelling – it gives people something to rally around, and believe in, when their own lives are boring or frozen or unbearable. It’s not just escapism, it can be community.’
‘It’s true. I used to get letters a lot on Loner, back when my agency still actually sent that stuff through to me, from fans saying things like that. People who were sick, in the hospital, who said that the show got them through. I’ll never forget one woman who said that the show gave her a family. Like these characters were real to her.’
There’s so much on the tip of my tongue. I was only in the treatment centre for a month, maybe less, and so long ago that I choose to erase it as a part of my personal history. How thin I was then, how stretched, and how close I was to death, or so they claimed. I brought the first three boxsets of Loner with me and played them every night after lights out, my clunky Dell laptop whirring and overheating beneath the sheets, and never felt alone. He does not need to know this.
‘Right.’ I’m trying to stay sharp but it’s difficult now, warmed by the whiskey, my senses blurred by the reality of him. ‘There you go. So maybe stop with the existential angst and enjoy the fact that you just won an Oscar.’
There are people circling us, trying to be subtle, but even at a party this sparse and secret Clark is a hot commodity, now more than ever. It’s miraculous, now I think of it, that we’ve been left alone for this long. I can see, out of the corner of my eye, someone taking a selfie with Clark clearly positioned in the background, trying to be subtle, and failing.
‘Let’s talk about something other than me, for the love of God,’ he says, gesturing to a waiter for more drinks. ‘How’s your life? What’s the haps in Echo Park?’
‘Wow, I’m only going to tell you if you promise never to say “the haps” ever again.’
I tell him about the roaches, half-expecting his eyes to glaze over from shock because this is so far removed from his reality, but instead he lights up, starts telling me about his past.
‘God, when I first moved to Hollywood I was dead broke, sleeping on friends’ couches, and for a while I ended up in this place in Koreatown… I mean,
you think that area’s bad now, you should’ve seen it in the nineties. Rats, roaches, for a while there was a pigeon problem, something to do with the roof. I woke up once without knowing why, and then realized that a rat had just run right across my pillow. Maybe across my face.’
‘How did you ever get to sleep?’ I ask. ‘The only thing I’ll say for my roaches is they’ve never come near me. They’re antisocial and I like them that way.’
‘I loved it,’ he murmurs. ‘It felt like living in the wild. That was appealing to me at the time.’
‘That was right after you dropped out of college?’
He raises an eyebrow.
‘Yes, ’89.’
‘Is it weird that I know so much about your life?’
‘Only because I know so little about yours.’
‘That’s how the relationship works.’ After a pause, I clarify. ‘I mean, between actor and viewer, or actor and adoring public. We see you every week on our TV screens, or at least every few months on a movie screen, and we get to feel like you’re a part of our lives, but you’re not. The screen doesn’t go both ways.’
‘Very profound.’
‘So, what do you want to know?’ I ask him, conscious that I’ve drunk more than I planned, conscious that I have not eaten enough today, conscious that things are blurring and loosening and I’m letting it happen.
‘I want to know why you love this stuff so much.’
‘What stuff?’
‘Television. Movies. All of it. You don’t love it like most people do – as entertainment. It’s more, for you.’
‘TV is reliable. Most characters on television don’t fundamentally change, right? And even when dramatic things happen, they happen in patterns, in narrative arcs. I’d watch the same show over and over again because you can feel things, but in a safe way. Even when someone leaves the show, they get a finale, a payoff, a few goodbye scenes. It’s comforting.’
He nods.
‘At a certain point when I was growing up, I just needed things that I could control.’