by Emma Dibdin
‘When is your lease up?’ he pushes.
‘It’s month to month,’ I admit.
‘All the more reason to get out. Listen, I understand trying to be sensible with money, and I applaud you for not getting over your head in debt like a lot of young people in big cities do. But you’re a professional. You’re entering a new phase of your career, and you need a place to work. And a place to rest.’ He lowers his voice, speaking urgently. ‘That place you’re in right now is going to crush you, so slowly and subtly that you won’t even know it’s happening until it’s too late, and you are too talented to let that happen.’
I stare at him, unnerved because I believe him, and finally nod yes.
‘But I’m paying you rent, to be clear.’
‘Fine, fine, but not market. We’ll come to a compromise.’
He pushes me gently down into the bed, both my hands in his hair as he straddles me, takes off my dress, begins a path with his mouth downwards from my neck.
Things move quickly, after that day.
*
‘So how does it feel to go viral?’ Faye texts me the morning after my profile with Clark goes live. She’s exaggerating, sort of, but the article has been trending all day across social media, with quotes picked up and aggregated everywhere from tabloids to blogs to the LA Times. I deleted Twitter from my phone, overwhelmed by the blend of delirious gratitude and just-as-delirious rage, but I still periodically check in on a browser.
Overwhelmingly, the reaction seems positive towards Clark, who comes off as his charismatic, generous self, bewildered by a bad year. Most of the attention is not on me, but some of it is: ‘It’s pretty depressing that a female writer is behind this,’ goes one representative comment, while others openly accuse me of trying to silence another woman. I’m not trying to silence Amabella. After the slew of unflattering coverage that’s come her way lately, I didn’t need to.
I also have a handful of enquiries from editors in my inbox, two of them offering me work upfront, and more LinkedIn notifications than I’ve ever seen in my life. A magazine wants to profile me, most surreally of all – an online-only women’s brand that claims to be spotlighting powerful young women in the media. ‘We’d love to hear your story,’ the reporter tells me over the phone, her tone breathless and earnest. ‘A kind of day-in-the-life thing about how you spend your hours, how you get it done, and then if you’re comfortable talking about it, some specifics on the Clark Conrad story. How you got him to talk, how you navigated the various scandals during your interview, whether a publicist was involved. I’m kind of dying to know how you pulled it off, honestly.’
I politely turn down all of the requests, explaining that I don’t want to complicate things for Clark by talking publicly about the story. When Access Hollywood calls, also wanting to interview me about the piece, I tell them the same. I don’t want to give anyone a reason to focus on my relationship with him. I am not the story, flattering though it was for a moment when this reporter made me feel as though I could be.
Because the truth is that the work is not front and centre in my mind any more, and hasn’t been for some time. I’ve never slipped easily into relationships, never understood how people around me could go from being single to having their existence permanently blurred into another person’s, coupling and uncoupling as naturally as moving between jobs. The idea of seeing someone every day, of going to bed with them and waking up with them and living with them, has always felt like a trap to me, until now. Every minute I don’t spend with him feels like a waste.
Tonight Clark is due to make his first post-Oscars, post-scandal appearance at a charity gala in Santa Monica. The press coverage will call him newly single, because he will arrive at the event alone, and he will leave alone.
‘I wish I could walk that carpet with you on my arm,’ he whispers into my ear, seconds before we leave in our separate cars. There was a reckless moment when I wanted to risk it, a moment when I even considered wearing a wig or dyeing my hair or otherwise disguising myself enough that I could be by his side. I am not famous, but anyone who attends any event with Clark Conrad will be instant tabloid fodder, and it takes only a quick Google search to connect my face with my byline. It would be the end of my career. And so, separate cars.
Though I’m supposed to go directly inside the event, I pause on the far end of the carpet to watch him. He’s in his element, signing autographs and taking pictures with elated fans, many of whom are holding up signs declaring ‘WE BELIEVE IN CLARK CONRAD’. The scandal already feels so distant, somehow, that the signs seem redundant to me, but it’s a sweet gesture nonetheless and I know it’ll mean a lot to him. I imagine he’s telling the fans as much at this very moment.
He looks up from the autograph pad he’s signing suddenly, looks right over the heads of everyone in the crowd, and locks eyes with me. As though nobody else exists.
16
Time passes differently when I’m with Clark. In our first clandestine month he has taken me all over California; on a private tour of five vineyards in Sonoma and Napa Valley, where I learned the term ‘volatizing the esters’ and tasted the tannins on his tongue as we kissed beside endless rows of vines. He took me to dinner in a private dining room at Spago, a restaurant I’ve never imagined setting foot in, where everything tastes like a more vivid and perfect version of itself. He took me whale-watching in Monterey and hiking in the Point Lobos State Reserve. He took me to see the rugged, impossible coastline of Big Sur, where we drove up the 1 overnight on his motorbike and arrived in time to see the sun rising over the Bixby Creek Bridge, red dawn sky gradually receding as the daylight turned the waves aquamarine. ‘Let’s go to Big Sur,’ he said to me shortly after midnight, as we lay together in the Studio City apartment that only feels like home when he’s there. ‘Right now.’ And I thought he was joking, of course, but Clark is never joking when it comes to these things.
Only when he suggested the Maldives did I finally have to remember how to say no. I am finally getting work now, a lot of it, and tempting though it is to let Clark consume my world and replace it with his own, I know that opportunity knocks rarely in this business. So we stay in-state, and I spend my days conducting junket interviews and attending press conferences and press screenings of new movies, networking with editors and with other journalists and pretending to be one of them, filing articles that talk about the industry as though I’m not living a double life. As though I’m still on the outside of Hollywood looking in, instead of spending my nights with Clark Conrad.
‘You are extraordinary,’ he tells me. ‘I was a dead man before I met you, and I didn’t even realize it. You brought me back to life.’ And though in a critical mood I’d have to call his dialogue a little corny, it feels true. Clark was on a kind of brink before we met and I have pulled him back, and Skye along with him. She’s doing immeasurably better, he tells me, newly committed to the self-care lifestyle he referenced in my Reel profile. ‘Healthy living is its own kind of addiction, I guess,’ he acknowledges, ‘but I’ll take it over the alternative.’
There is nothing he and I don’t talk about now. In a moment of nauseous recollection I tell him about Schlattman, and how small and gutless I’d felt in that hotel room, how stupid for thinking he was interested in my opinions on the industry. After I finish, there’s an expression on Clark’s face I’ve never seen before, real rage, and on my behalf. ‘I’m going to make sure that son of a bitch never works again,’ he mutters through gritted teeth, and my heart swells.
Amabella is the only subject we avoid. I find out from an article that he has settled with her out of court, and that she has therefore withdrawn her application for a permanent restraining order. ‘She got her payday,’ he tells me at last. ‘Which is what she wanted all along, I think.’ And that’s the end of Amabella, between us, which is fine by me.
What he can’t do is take me anywhere public, though there are ways around even this. One of our first tentative attempts to test this
boundary comes midway through April, when Clark and his business partner throw a small gathering to celebrate the official launch of High Six Productions. It’s a crowd of around a hundred people at Soho House, spectacular views sprawled out in 360 degrees around us. One of the biggest perks is that there are no paparazzi here, because everyone enters and leaves the club through a basement parking lot, and once inside there’s an unspoken guarantee of discretion that gives us a little more leeway. And so I am here with Clark, but not overtly with him.
‘Let me do a loop, and then come find me,’ he’d told me as we emerged out of the elevator into the bar with its dark leather and indoor trees and endless skylines. I keep wondering when I’ll become inured to the beauty of sights like this, particularly now that I live in an apartment with its own panoramic view, but it doesn’t feel imminent. And so I wait, letting Clark make his initial impression at the party alone, because it’s in the entrances and the exits that most rumours get started.
Skye is here too, looking languidly elegant in a floor-length peacock blue maxi-dress, made of some silky material that floats around her as she walks, and falls into perfect layers when she sits down beside me on a barstool. I’m watching Clark and pretending not to, and Skye stares as though she’s caught me in a lie.
She knows, of course, about Clark and me, and I can’t imagine how to tell her that I was telling the truth in Venice, that I wasn’t fucking her dad at the point when she asked. It’s not particularly clear to me that she cares. She has her phone in her hand but she’s not using it, and I don’t understand why she’s here beside me instead of anywhere else in the room. Instagram royalty, socialite, It Girl, she should be with her squad, and yet every time I see her she’s alone. If she were a character in a movie, this is the point where I’d begin wondering if she were a ghost, because I’ve never seen her interact with anyone or make any impact on the world around her. But that’s not entirely true – as cool a crowd as this is, there are a few people who do a poor job hiding their stares as they realize who she is. She’s drinking a bottle of Fiji water with a straw built into the lid, a new accessory I’ve seen springing up on red carpets lately, and I feel suddenly conscious of my own cocktail.
‘You went to school, right?’ she asks me, without preamble.
‘As in college? Yeah, I studied English.’
‘Very English of you,’ she says quietly, like she’s trying to make a joke, but I’m not sure enough to laugh.
‘I thought about doing a master’s in journalism,’ I continue, barrelling onwards as I tend to do in uncomfortable moments with Skye. ‘But it was a lot of money, and I decided everything they could teach me I could learn better actually doing the work, so.’
‘I maybe want to go back to school.’
‘Really?’ I’m not sure why I’m surprised. Skye has never seemed stupid to me, if maybe lacking in curiosity. ‘That’s great. At USC?’
She nods, fidgeting with the ring on her finger, slowly spinning it around and around. It strikes me, not for the first time, that she must be on some kind of tranquillizer. The soft, slow voice and unshakeable calm that I’ve witnessed in her don’t mesh with the glimpses of the girl I saw from afar prior to our ever meeting; that girl was gutsy and loud and walked into every room secure in the knowledge of her elevated place within it. The Skye I know is hesitant, quiet, and gives you the impulse to shield her from things.
‘Just depends on my dad.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He was never wild about me going to school for anything but acting.’
I frown, looking instinctively towards Clark who’s deep in conversation with two suits.
‘Why not?’
She shrugs.
‘He always says I take after him. That I’m a natural in front of the camera, and it’d be a waste not to use that.’
‘It doesn’t really matter what he wants, though. Right? I mean, I think he just wants you to do whatever’s going to make you happy. He was probably encouraging you with the modelling and acting because that’s what he thought you wanted.’
She nods, vaguely.
‘But if you want to go back to school, you should. Maybe somewhere out of state, even, somewhere you wouldn’t draw so much attention.’ I can only imagine the paparazzi pile-on at the USC campus if Skye were to return now.
‘I’d never want to move away from him. He’s like my lifeboat.’
She means lifeline, I think, but I’m not going to correct her. Nor am I going to tell her that I know why she sees Clark as her only real family, that I know this is more than metaphorical. He comes over to join us then, bending down to kiss Skye on the head and ruffle her hair, which slips effortlessly back into place afterwards as though it was never touched. I take his hand as it’s offered and let him pull me into a loose hug, exactly the kind of gesture that will appear normal for casual work acquaintances. It’s so studied, the way he performs in public, that later at my apartment I have to ask.
‘Have you ever been involved with a journalist before?’
He looks up.
‘Well, for over two decades I was only involved with one woman – with one exception, as you know. Then Amabella. Then you. There’s not a huge pool of dating history to pull from.’
‘What about before you met Carol?’
‘No,’ he says with a frown, clearly stymied by my sudden curiosity. ‘I dated a lot of women, but to my recollection none of them were in your field. Why?’
‘I just wanted to know. Sleeping with a source is unmapped territory for me.’
‘Come on.’ He half-scoffs. ‘A source?’
I stare at him.
‘Yeah. Why, you wouldn’t call yourself that?’
‘I just always think of that word as applying more to hard news journalism. You’re not exactly breaking Watergate here.’
‘Are you saying you don’t see me as a real journalist?’
‘No, that’s not what I’m saying at all.’
‘I think that’s exactly what you’re saying.’
Though I’m stung, I’m also having fun. Playing the part of the angry girlfriend, to see how he will make this up to me, because he’s the kind of man that will.
‘Jessica…’ He puts his hands on either side of my face, pulling me gently towards him. ‘That wasn’t about you. It was about me, and how trivial my life and career seem when you put them in the context of sources and reporting and— You know I’ve never been comfortable with all this. The Reel thing was good, and now it’s done, and I’m excited to get back to making movies and being a father. And being with my girl.’
I lean into him as he kisses me, warmed by the realization that I’m the one he’s calling his girl, and the nagging voice in my head gets quieter. And he’s not done yet making it up to me.
The next day, I get a call from Clark when I’m midway through running in the canyon, and my reception is so bad that I have to wait and call him back when I’m at the base. He tells me to meet him at an address in Burbank that evening, offering no explanation beyond ‘trust me’.
‘What should I wear?’ I ask, but he’s already gone.
The address turns out to be an unmarked warehouse in a lot that does not seem to belong to a studio. When I knock hesitantly on the metal door there’s no answer, and so I go in, half-expecting a sound stage, but this looks more like a storage locker.
‘Hello?’
‘This way,’ I hear Clark say from somewhere to my left, and follow the sound of his voice until I round a corner and almost gasp out loud.
Richard Loner’s office was the most iconic set on the show, and not only for its unique design: an L-shaped room with an ornate bed tucked into the nook. By virtue both of being a workaholic and living a double life, Loner spent a lot of time in his office, often sleeping overnight there and holding clandestine meetings with unsavoury associates from his vigilante duties (his law firm, always bustling with activity by day, was reliably and mysteriously empty by night). In
retrospect, this set was clearly a cost-cutting measure devised early in the show’s run, before it became a hit, but by the time the producers had money available it had become too integral to ditch.
And now I’m walking into that office, where Clark is waiting for me dressed in a black polo neck and leather trousers, an outfit that he would never wear but Loner would.
‘Oh my God,’ I hear myself say, and I know I’m trembling a little. Fiction colliding with reality has a kind of impact, a physical weight, and Clark takes my hands in his to steady me.
‘Surprise.’
‘What— How does this exist?’
‘You’re the first person to see it in advance of the revival.’
‘They’ve rebuilt the set already?’ I ask, looking around at the white carpet, the dark wood panelling, the artwork in exactly the places I remember from the show.
‘They never demolished it. The rest of them got torn down, but I refused to let them take this. I paid to have it shipped over here, preserved in plastic and just kept in storage. Sometimes I’d just come here and walk around, you know, get back into character.’
‘That’s… incredibly weird. And amazing. I love that you did that. I love that you kept this.’
‘I know you’re a fan,’ he murmurs against my hair as he lifts me into his arms, lowers me down onto the desk, and moments later on the bed I have to bite my tongue to avoid calling him by his character’s name.
‘I have something to ask you,’ he says afterwards, and I look up at him, trying to steady myself in the rush of this man, in this room. ‘I’m going to Cannes next month. It’ll be a lot of meetings, networking with distributors, drumming up finances for our first couple of projects, all of which I’m sure sounds fascinating to you. But there’ll be screenings, and parties. And beaches. And the flat-out best hotel I’ve ever stayed at in my life, bar none – it’s in this beautiful cape, tucked into the side of the ocean, twenty minutes from Nice.’