“You think so?” I murmured.
“Mm, yeah. It’s good on you.” Your eyes flashed. “You do black really well, and the silver gives it a little kick. You look badass.”
I stared at myself.
“You do,” you affirmed. “You look like a rebel filmmaker.”
My face heated. I wasn’t sure if you were making fun of me. “I think I look like a witch,” I mumbled.
“Yeah. Well, honestly a haircut might help with that.”
Back outside on the sidewalk, you took my hand. Once the initial voltage had subsided, I was consumed with something like embarrassment. My hand went limp in yours. Being seen in my company would have an immediate and negative impact on your image, I was certain. At your side, I was portly and short, even in the unfortunate wedge sandals. But you led me along the sidewalk like a rescue dog and drew me into a hair salon, where you sat me in the chair and told the stylist what to do. I came out with a hard bob that cut at my jawline. Framing my round, primitive face, the haircut looked like an expensive wig. But if I wasn’t beautiful, the haircut implied, at least I was worthy of note.
As we were walking back to the car, two men ahead of us on the sidewalk abruptly turned around. I froze. It took a full moment to understand that the objects they aimed weren’t weapons but cameras. You didn’t falter. Instead you continued straight toward the men, forcing them to walk backward while shooting. You didn’t smile or pose but strode forward in a natural fashion—a lady out shopping with her friend. I felt my own face tense into a shrewish pucker. I had a pair of sunglasses, but they were in my purse, and as I trotted next to you, I dug down to find them. The camera shutters fired unremittingly.
“Elise,” one of the photographers called.
You kept walking at the same pace, though I sensed an almost imperceptible pause in your gait, as if you were considering whether to respond.
“Elise,” the other photographer parroted.
You smiled stiffly and increased your speed. “Excuse me,” you said, not unpleasantly. I hurried to keep by your side. “Excuse me,” you repeated and, taking my hand, turned into the street. Cars were rushing past, but you edged into traffic and seized the first moment to dart across.
IV.
OVER THE next few days, you fluttered off to appointments and auditions, and I paced the house like a watchdog. Rafael sometimes let himself in during the day, but most often he came at night. Once, I heard him jiggling his key in the door after dark and ascending the steps to your bedroom. After that I couldn’t hear anything, but I soundlessly turned the knob of my door and edged down the hall. I stood outside your bedroom and listened. In my mind, I saw you and Rafael together, your softness and his hardness, and my own body throbbed. The sounds you made were glorious, a song of pleasure so pure that it brought me near orgasm without a touch.
On Tuesday, the eve of our seventh day together, we ordered Thai food and stayed up late on the patio, a swollen gold moon above. Rafael was out of town for the weekend, and you were all mine. You chain-smoked American Spirits while rambling about the clothes your stylist wanted you to wear. You were cultivating a different kind of persona, you’d told her many times.
“She should know this by now,” you kept saying. “I want vintage, I want bohemian, I want real. I don’t want to be a sex symbol or the cutesy girl next door. She knows that. If she can’t be on my team, I’m going to have to find someone else.”
After each pronouncement, you spilled sauvignon blanc down your throat. When the bottle was finished, you asked me to open another, and I obliged. I sat and listened, nodding and making encouraging or disapproving noises. My opinion, unsolicited and ungiven, was that you were anything but bohemian. You weren’t tough or iconoclastic or earthy. You were delicate, finely crafted, a light and vitreous thing.
“I’m too tired to get up,” you moaned, lighting another cigarette. “Ugh, and I have to have lunch with Mireille Sauvage tomorrow.”
At the sound of this name, an image came to mind of a sinuous blond with an antelope face. “I think I’ve heard of her.”
“I’m sure you have. She’s been in a lot of things lately. But honestly I don’t even want to see her,” you sighed. “There’s a rumor that she’s being considered for the new Perren movie and I’m sick about it.”
My heart skipped. “There’s a new Perren movie?”
You glanced away, mouth twitching. “Yeah, it’s pretty far off though. I’m still hoping I might catch his eye. My agent’s trying to put my name forward, but he doesn’t really care about agents. I probably won’t have a chance.”
“Of course you will,” I said robotically. “You have just as much of a chance as anyone.”
“No, I’m a mess.”
I didn’t respond.
Your eyes met mine at a feline angle as you took another pull from your wineglass. “Anyway, it’s good for me to keep building a friendship with Mireille, in case she does end up getting the part. So much of this business is about connections, and I have to take the long view.”
It occurred to me at this moment, for the first time, that I now occupied a space—as remote as it might be—in “this business.” In this web of connections, I was only two degrees from Auguste Perren. Excruciatingly, exhilaratingly near. For a moment, my breath left me.
“Oh, and I found out I didn’t get the Shadow Wolves role. The callbacks came in, and I was cut from the first round. I don’t understand why. It’s true I’m a little young for the lead, but since when does that matter?” You flicked your cigarette indignantly. “They said I didn’t have the weight to be an ICE agent, that they wanted someone with—what did they call it?—sangfroid. I don’t even know what that means.”
“It means cold blood. In French.”
“I mean, I know pretty much what it means, but I don’t understand why I don’t have it.”
“Maybe they just think you look too nice,” I said, but it sounded cruel on my tongue, and I wanted to snatch the words back.
You glowered. “It’s embarrassing. They gave the part to an actress who I swear is even younger than me.”
At this moment, you didn’t look like a federal agent so much as a petulant girl, but I said, “It’s their loss,” putting conviction into my voice. “The movie will probably tank.”
You looked at me for a moment, bruised, and I saw a spark of hope flash and fade in your eyes. “Thanks, Abby. I know you’re just saying that to make me feel better, but I appreciate it. And maybe you’re right. Anyway, I have a session at the Rhizome tomorrow afternoon. I heard someone say that Perren was coming this month, so maybe I’ll get lucky and he’ll be there. He only visits a few times a year. And it’s usually a surprise. He likes to just show up randomly and do a session with his own guide, like a regular person. Then he walks around the property and has lunch in the restaurant. Everybody pretends like it’s no big deal, but really they’re killing themselves to get near him.”
I’d finished with wine hours before, and now I took a long drink of water as I absorbed this information.
“I didn’t know there was a restaurant there,” I said.
“Oh, yeah, it’s great. It’s organic, macrobiotic, five-star chef. Everybody eats together at these long farmhouse tables. It’s a really interesting group. Screenwriters, directors, and some of the more complex actors, the unusual ones who want to challenge themselves and aren’t content to just look good. The kind of people I want to be associated with.”
You stopped talking. I was looking at you, but I was imagining sitting at a table beside Auguste Perren. I imagined him turning toward me to ask my name. Our eyes locking.
“Sounds incredible,” I said.
“It is. And the place is so beautiful, Abby. It’s this whole campus, with a spa and gardens and a natural pool. Like a retreat center. It’s so serene and relaxing. I swear, sometimes it’s the only thing that keeps me sane.”
You stopped talking then, and looked into your glass. Studiously you swirle
d the wine, then drank it down. I didn’t say anything. I let you have this moment of solipsistic contemplation, which was what I imagined all actresses needed.
It was after midnight when I helped you into the house and followed you up the Talavera stairs, in case you missed a step and fell. After you were tucked into bed, breathing loudly through your mouth, I stood in the room for a few moments, watching you. I remembered those everlasting slumber parties, those torturous nights when I’d stare at your face in the dark—your profile like that of an illustrated girl in an English children’s book, the fine articulations of an Alice or a Wendy, the curl at the nostril, the vermilion of the upper lip—before you turned away, in slumber, and the hair fell across your face, screening me out.
You slept until noon the next day, took your kombucha in a thermos, and left me alone in the house. I sat in the brown velvet chair by the window and tried to read, but I could only think of the Rhizome. A bitter substance threaded through my veins. I resented you for going, for leaving me behind. You might be sitting limply at a table beside Perren at that very moment, gazing at him through dull, hungover eyes. I saw the other hollow sycophants at the same table and fantasized about inserting myself among them, lifting the table and tilting its contents to the floor. I gripped the book in my hands and glared through the plate glass window at the bolt of land rolling into the Pacific.
For years, I’d imagined the moment of meeting Perren, the instant understanding that would pass between us. Although the circumstances surrounding this encounter remained opaque, I knew it would someday happen. Of this I was certain, just as I’d been certain of seeing you again, Elise. It was fated, as all great artist alliances seemed to be fated: Van Gogh and Gauguin, Emerson and Thoreau, Pound and Eliot. Sometimes it was the younger one who approached the elder, whose supreme confidence drove him to write adulatory letters to his idol and introduce himself. This boldness was often, astonishingly, rewarded. The legend replied to the admirer, in warm letters full of encouragement and validation, and a lasting correspondence began. Mentorships were established. Later, when the neophyte flowered into his own abilities and matured into an artist the equal of his senior, the mentorship became friendship, and both legacies were imprinted on history.
Weren’t such couplings inevitable? The senior artist must suspect this. On some unconscious level, he must await the arrival of the letter, the knock on the studio door. It wasn’t merely out of egoism that he might respond, but also an element of fear. Trembling, he must sense the encroaching tide of youth just outside the gate: he must foresee his own usurpation. Wiser than resistance was appeasement, ingratiation. The artists who responded to their brazen admirers, and invited them in, were aligning themselves with the brute force of the future. In crouching to lift the next generation, they ensured their own continued relevance.
I’d begun letters to Perren but had never gotten past the first line. There was too much to say, and nothing to say. It was impossible. Someday, though, it would not be. I’d write the letter, knock on the door. He’d recognize my purpose, respect my power, and bend to welcome me.
It was dark by the time you came home, and you were with Rafael. I could hear your voice in the driveway, shouting, “And how is that supposed to make me feel?” Rafael’s response was indecipherable. The front door burst open, and neither of you spoke as you went toward the stairs. You gave me a faraway look as you passed by the living room. I could tell you’d been drinking. Rafael didn’t look my way but followed you up the stairs in a boorish hunch. Once your bedroom door was closed, the voices returned, low and toxic, followed by thuds—perhaps a shoe thrown to the floor, a slammed dresser drawer. The ceiling above me tremored, and I wondered whether stingrays had a sense of hearing. Were they frightened by the noise? Or were they oblivious, numbly adrift in another dimension?
I curled on the sofa, making myself small. At last, a door banged upstairs and I heard you screech some pejorative, your voice hoarse and quavering, as Rafael glided down the steps and out the door.
A moment later, you were downstairs, crumpled in the chair in front of me. You wore the same white romper that had been pristine when you left the house that morning but now was stained with wine and mascara. With your hair curled in wispy tendrils at your temples, you resembled a giant infant.
“I hate him, Abby,” you hiccupped. “He’s vain and shallow and doesn’t care about me at all.”
“What happened?”
“God, I don’t even remember what started it. We were out at Cecconi’s, and he said something insulting. I don’t remember the exact words now, but it was something about women not needing to develop a craft, because they either look the part or they don’t. And before I could even argue with him, I saw him checking out this other girl. It turned into a whole scene. It was horrible. And when I went in the bathroom, Jessica Starck came in to ask if I was all right. What nerve! She’s the one I was telling you about before, the one who tried to steal Chris Coonan away from me. She’s a snake. And she knows that I know that. So I’m there crying in the bathroom, and she comes in and says she heard the whole thing and that she’s so sorry. It was humiliating.”
It did sound humiliating, I said. You told the story again, your face reddening as the tears returned. When you went back to the beginning, again, I came to you and helped you stand and brought you up to bed. I wanted to interrupt, to ask whether you’d seen Perren at the Rhizome, but instead I soothed you. Everything will be better in the morning, I said. Don’t worry. I’m here with you.
For each of your fights, you and Rafael had a passionate reconciliation. Whatever he’d done wrong had been a misunderstanding, you’d tell me. He’d apologized for everything, and you didn’t remember half of what had happened anyway. You’d probably overreacted; you sometimes got that way when you drank. You became stupid and suspicious. He was your soul mate, you said, and you’d marry him someday.
In the midst of one such apologia, you handed me the keys to your second car—a silver Tesla, sleek as a bullet—and encouraged me to explore. The car was fun to drive, and I loved traveling down the coastline, discovering the beach towns—Redondo, Manhattan, Hermosa—with their In-N-Out Burgers, Hawaiian food huts, and indolent houses worshipping the water. Venice captivated me most of all. There was a romance, a sun-bleached purity, to its grit. As I traveled the boardwalk, I thought of Michigan’s scuttling crustaceans hunched in their parkas and cars and houses. Here, nothing was cloaked. Everything was laid bare in the sun’s great photographic flash.
One afternoon, I went to the water’s edge and sat cross-legged on the sand. The clatter and whir of distant skateboarders washed into the ferment of the waves. With a lip of ocean foam flirting a yard from my knees, I quieted my conscious mind and let my sense of identity blur. Like that, I entered the Spring, established Unity Gain. The waters of my unconscious seeped through, and I let them pool into a waking dream. Perhaps the ocean suggested diving imagery, because in my subsequent reverie I enjoyed a kinship with cetaceans, rode on their backs through tropical depths. Afterward, I walked back over the beach in a state of calm. As I coasted past the skate park, a boy arched up in front of me, the wheels of his board inches from my face—and I caught a glimpse of an open eye on the bottom of the slab. Back on the boardwalk, I passed henna tables and tattoo shops and briefly strode alongside a rollerblading, dreadlocked guitarist before he pulled ahead of me, singing to himself, deep within his own waking Spring.
I parked the Tesla in the driveway and breezed into the house. You were in the living room, cross-legged in the hanging wicker pod chair. A bright yellow sundress draped over your knees and, paired with the vivid flame of your hair, made it hard to look straight at you.
“Hi, Abby,” you said lightly, though I sensed something new in your voice, wavering.
“Sit down for a second. I want to tell you something.”
I sat on the Navajo couch, resting my bag at my side.
“Listen,” you said. “I should probab
ly just say it right away. I found out I got the Joan Didion biopic.”
“You did? That’s fantastic!” Even as I uttered these words, my heart sank.
“It really is, I know.” Your smile was tight. “I’m happy but also kind of terrified. But, yeah, it’s a great thing for me. A total game-changer.” Your pod chair swung gently. “Of course it means things are going to get hectic. Like, I don’t even know if I’m going to have time for Raf.”
I was silent. Sitting on the couch, I felt like a small child about to learn of a divorce.
“I mean, I won’t be able to spend time with you the way we’ve been doing.” You seemed to be gathering your words carefully, and I felt a crimp at my throat. “But I’ve loved having you here, Abby. I really want you to stay.”
The crimp intensified and moved through my body, like the wringing of a wet rope. “Of course,” I interrupted, speaking through the pain. “I completely understand. I’ll figure something out. It’s been an absolute pleasure staying here. I’m so grateful that you hosted me for so long and showed me so much.”
After the effort of speaking, I took a long breath. I couldn’t process, yet, the sudden annihilation of my grandest hopes. All I could think of at that moment was how accustomed I’d become to seeing your face every day. Simply looking at you, I was certain, made me a better artist, a better person. You couldn’t have known this, of course. You could never have known the effect your physical presence had on me or what it would mean to thrust me back into the darkness. You could never have been that cruel. All at once, the prospect of returning to Michigan reared up, and I was overcome with vertigo. I realized that I was gripping the arm of the couch.
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