Geoffrey Milanowski was Leo’s suit-wearing, chain-smoking older brother. He’d taken to corporate heirdom more eagerly than Leo and disgraced himself several times in the process. Gum—as Leo insisted on calling him—spent most of his time in New York, sleeping in his clothes and squinting at paperwork he didn’t understand. He had a string of one-sided professional feuds, a perennially unfinished MBA, and very few friends. Gum wasn’t a household name like Leo, but he was well-known enough that if a cop pulled him over on Route 101 and failed him on a breathalyzer test, the world would hear about it. And had.
“I love the guy, but Dad will just accuse me of enabling him again. I can always tell when he wants to go on a bender. I haven’t seen you for six months, mon frère, it’s time to blow off some steam.”
“Six months, really?”
“He worries about me,” Leo said. “If I don’t reply to one message, it’s all Leonard, you’ve become a recluse!”
Leo put on a special Manhattan whine to imitate his brother. Leo himself had the sort of voice you couldn’t put your finger on, because he’d lived between countries for most of his life and never settled into a standardized accent. He sounded like a Londoner and a Brooklynite and a cosmopolitan French prince all at once; it was part of why his public appeal was equally strong in Europe and America. That and the cheekbones.
Win curled her fingers against Leo’s palm. Behind them she could hear the faint, far-off cries of a paparazzo calling their names. “Put your jacket on me?”
Leo shrugged his battered leather jacket off and settled it around Win’s shoulders. It smelled like his cologne, and like airplanes, and a little like coffee. She looked up, and Leo was looking back at her. The air was still warm from the day’s pounding sun, but it was evening now, and she could feel Leo along her side, at all the places their skin almost touched. His jacket was warm, too, like she’d stepped into the heat of his body.
“We’re not doing the kiss until tomorrow,” she said.
Leo didn’t laugh, as she’d thought he might. He reached up and touched her cheek, long fingers sliding gently over her jawline. She didn’t speak. The photos would be better if she didn’t. He tapped two fingers against her mouth and said, “Understood.”
They watched the last gulls of the evening careen through the sky. Marie texted Win when she was sure enough photos had been taken, and they climbed back to the waiting cars.
“Any word from Paramount?” she asked Emil, once they were safely behind the tinted windows.
He shook his head, fingers flying over his phone screen; he was coordinating with the team at Chanel, with whom Win had just signed a contract to head up their next campaign. Win didn’t press further. It always pained Emil to be the bearer of bad news.
Perhaps they would never hear about the role again. The film she and Patrick had been fighting for was a new adaptation of The Sun Also Rises. Win was in the running to play the female lead. It was an intense prestige project, with an electrifying script and big-name director attached, and the plot itself refocused on her character’s storyline. Her dialogue simmered, and Win had wanted the role immediately. But the movie was also Oscar-bait, and the producers were known for their skittishness. They were already nervous about the idea of casting a British Indian woman in the lead, and the additional threat of a scandal would have them scurrying from her as fast as they could. Now Nathan had placed Win at the center of the ugliest celebrity breakup of the summer.
But, Win reminded herself, nothing had come of it yet. She hadn’t been axed; no word from Patrick meant he was still working on it, and she was determined to do everything she could to alleviate Nathan’s damage. With Leo on her arm, it was simple enough to pull focus. Nobody could resist the glamour of a love story. Their trip to Saint-Tropez was proof, to the producers and to the world, that Nathan’s dramas were all of his own making and that Win had long since moved on.
Win and Leo shared a cigarette on the way back to La Réserve, a snake’s tail of black SUVs riding along in their wake. Emil kept himself busy and pretended unconvincingly not to notice the smoke.
Win said, “Don’t tell Marie.”
“I’m sure her informants have already let her know,” Leo said.
“I resent that, Leo,” Emil said. “I haven’t seen a thing.”
Emil had wanted to be an actor, he once told Win, and played the newspaper boy in his college production of A Streetcar Named Desire. He spent the first half of the run happily categorizing the props, talking down their Stanley from the edge of despair after a costar called him “Marlon Brando with eczema,” and responding to a determined missive from the dean to cut the nudity, and realized that he was much happier offstage. He handed his part over to his boyfriend and never looked back.
The professionals outside La Réserve had been joined by starstruck French teenagers, screaming Leo’s name and holding up their phones with shaking hands. Win and Leo played tipsy and flirty, as though they’d been drinking champagne in the car, and Leo waved at a couple of fans with his arm around Win’s shoulders, drawing her back against him. She reached up to slip her fingers through his. Everything felt familiar. His big palms, the showy rings on his fingers, and Marie waiting for them when they tripped into Win’s penthouse suite.
“Hi,” Win said. “I think that went pretty well.”
Marie nodded. “We got some good shots. You’re trending on most platforms.” She came closer and sighed. “Oh, you were smoking.”
“She didn’t inhale,” Leo said. Marie turned to him, taking in his buzz cut with pursed lips.
“Leo,” she said.
“Marie.”
“I’ve got the yacht confirmed for eleven o’clock tomorrow,” Marie said to Win. “I’ve tipped off some paparazzi, they’ll be ready to tail it. We’re going to wait until we’re away from the coast to do the kiss, I want it to look like you’re alone.”
“You going to mark another spot for us?” Leo’s tone was mocking.
“Yes,” Marie said, giving him a cool look. Leo and Marie had never actually fought, but they often seemed on the cusp of it. He’d made a lot of trouble for Marie in the past—she could still only mention the Met Gala incident in a guttural hiss—and in turn Marie had wrangled Leo into a lot of stunts he hadn’t wanted to do. Their antagonism was well-founded, even before you got into their disagreements on what was good for Win’s image.
“I’m going to get an early night,” Win said. “Sorry we didn’t have time to eat.”
She hadn’t eaten much recently, the upheaval of the last few days combined with a low anxious pit of nausea in her stomach throwing her off her meal plan. She would have breakfast tomorrow, maybe out with Leo on the terrace. Her eyes were strained, her shoulders heavy. Sleep, then food.
Leo released her hand; she had forgotten he was still holding it. He moved in closer to her, and she tilted her head up instinctively. Then she stopped.
They were hidden away in her suite, and the hotel was discreet and expensive enough that staff wouldn’t leak updates to the press. There was no need to kiss good night.
“Have a nice evening,” she said.
“No other warnings?”
Win shrugged. “The usual. Don’t pick anyone up in the bar. But I think you’re going to bed soon, anyway.” There were faint shadows under his eyes, and Leo had been traveling all day as well. A week of raving in Berlin: she was pretty sure Leo would be asleep before midnight, and told him so.
Leo reached out and tugged a strand of her hair, as though testing the give. “You think you’ve got me all figured out.”
“It’s been seven years,” Win said. “You can say goodbye to your secrets, Milanowski.”
Leo’s mouth opened, very briefly. He seemed to decide against what he had planned to say. “Sleep well,” he said, and turned, hands shoved into his pockets, shoulders curling in.
Once she was alone, Win kicked off her heels and pulled out her phone. Emil had switched the SIM card two days ago an
d pared down her contacts to less than ten. There was a rambling voice message from Shift, her best friend, which Win listened to while she took off her jewelry. Shift didn’t say anything about Nathan, just talked about the rain in Montreal and how her boyfriend Charlie had missed the delivery of her new audio mixer and wasn’t even sorry about it because he’d been in the backyard at the time teaching the neighbor’s dog to count to five.
It was nothing that required an immediate response. Win switched the phone off and stumbled through the door to the wide bed that was waiting for her, silk sheets, the French windows of the balcony left open and the sea air fluttering through gauze curtains. She collapsed onto it with her laptop, scanning idly through social media, watching the first stirrings of hysteria grow. When she finally slept, she slept restlessly.
Chapter Two
Since she was twenty years old, Win had been two different people, living two different lives.
The first person was the Win who had, give or take some adolescent angst, always existed. Win grew up running wild with her best friend in North East London and then, determined to make a name for herself, grew decidedly less wild. She worked fourteen-hour days in the rain or dark. She had an acidic gift for mimicry, a complicated relationship with her mother, and a bad temper. This was the Win who attended late-night crisis meetings with Marie and spent hours alone with a script trying to talk her way into character. As a teenager, this Win had wanted two things very badly: for her father to get better, and to be given the chance to make it as an actor. She got one of them.
The second person, the second life that Win lived was as Whitman Tagore, international movie star, youngest woman to win a Leading Actress BAFTA, and venerated in both London and Hollywood. Win and Marie had spent the past seven years perfecting Whitman Tagore, testing her angles, honing her glossy edges, working and reworking her flaws. By this point, she was a masterpiece.
Whitman Tagore was never tired. Whitman Tagore was never angry. Whitman Tagore was never wasted. She worked hard, but she didn’t do anything crude like sweat off her makeup, starve herself for a role, or take pills to keep herself awake. Most of all, Whitman Tagore was calm. She did not blink when cameras flashed in her face. She did not respond when talk show hosts speculated about her sex life. She could be emotional, but only when it became her; she could cry prettily as she accepted an award, but she could not sob in the back of a taxi. She could admit experiencing racism and sexism at the hands of the film industry, but she could never accuse a specific man of harassing her. Beneath the folds of this calm no move was uncalculated, no facial expression unplanned. Marie had written the mantra. Stay calm. Don’t panic. Stick to the narrative.
There hadn’t always been two Whitmans. For a while, she had hoped that Win would be good enough for the world. But the split from her real self that she kept closely guarded and the self she presented to the public was not gradual. It happened all at once, seven years ago. A Sunday. It was the day Josip sent the recording to the Daily Mail.
Win had been in America, sliding from bit parts in ensemble comedies to sidekick roles in romantic dramas. She didn’t have a name for herself yet, but she was creeping slowly into the public consciousness, the newcomer Indian actress with deadpan delivery and a skill for stealing a scene even when she was the character with the least lines.
It had been jarring, to see herself described as an “Indian” actress. Win had grown up distinguishing between British Asians like herself and real Indian Indians like her parents and extended family. Becoming well-known in America meant allowing that boundary to slip away. “Yes, we don’t want people to put you in a box,” her agent Patrick agreed, “but we also don’t want people to feel confused by you.” British with Indian heritage was too long and clunky, and Americans didn’t use the label British Asian. British on its own left people feeling deceived, like there was something she was trying to hide. Let it go, Patrick advised her. You’re Indian, but you grew up in England and you have a white first name, so you’re not too Indian. They can call you what they want as long as they’re casting you. Just don’t let them make you do the accent.
At the time she was in New York for a series of meetings with Patrick and a director they had been pursuing. Gigi Waits had just received her first Oscar for Best Director, the second woman to ever do so, and she was known for scooping up lesser known talents and transforming them into overnight stars. Her expectations as a director were well-known: Her cast should be disciplined. They should be happy to redo the same scene forty times without pause. They should be prepared to spend hours simulating hysteria. They should be ready to learn languages, instruments, fighting styles—and quickly. Win was desperate to work with Gigi, who would push her and strain her and bring the acclaim and success Win needed to turn a few fledgling achievements into a career.
That Sunday, Win and Patrick were invited for brunch at Gigi’s loft in the East Village, and it was in the cab on the way over that Patrick’s phone started ringing. Win never found out who was on the other end of the line—an assistant maybe, or a gloating rival. Whoever it was, Patrick’s face dropped as if someone had died. He stared at Win in disbelief. Win must have looked confused, but a part of her, somehow, knew that Josip had done something terrible.
The voicemail that her ex-boyfriend sent the Hollywood Reporter, in exchange for an undisclosed sum of cash and a boost to the sales of his band’s new album, had been recorded three weeks earlier while Win was still in the UK. When Patrick played it to her in the back seat of the taxi, she could barely recognize herself. She didn’t remember saying those things. She only remembered calling Josip very late at night, alone in her flat between a flickering streetlight and an empty highball glass.
What are you supposed to do when your boyfriend of a year goes to a club with another girl, grinding close and smirking as they kiss, her hand already disappearing into his jeans? Do you pretend not to believe it? What about when you try to confront him and he doesn’t speak to you for four days? Are you supposed to just take the hint and let him unstitch himself from your life? What if you haven’t slept because of your filming schedule and you’re on a no-dairy-no-sugar diet, so your only indulgence is vodka sodas? What if you look the girl up online and she seems to be everything you’re not—laid-back, fun, unfazed? Doesn’t it make sense to pick up the phone and wait for the inevitable beep?
Nobody heard any of that, though. They only heard Win’s dark, vicious snarl on the voicemail, the cruel twist of her words as she swore to hate Josip for the rest of her life, the half-sneered jeer about his terrible music, how he was going nowhere and fast, how she didn’t and had never needed him.
The recording spent two days on the front page of every gossip site in the UK, and at least half of the American ones, too. Josip was the lead singer of a mediocre Illinois rock band with a few lucky singles, but he was handsome and he knew how to command attention. It was what had attracted Win to him in the first place; now, it attracted a pack of late-night talk shows all too happy to laugh about crazy ex-girlfriends and give his album a plug in the process. Win’s status was transformed from the interesting new girl to an international joke.
She would listen to the voicemail hundreds of times in the coming months. Presenters quoted it to her at interviews. Late-night hosts played it for their guests, who laughed merrily along. For a while a meme made the rounds where people performed it in their best weeping diva voices, fake mascara tear stains smeared across their faces, and “Hey, asshole, I’m just calling to tell you to go fuck yourself” became the standard opener for all ironic whiny tweets. She forced herself to replay it late at night, when she wanted a reminder of why she could never let it happen again.
“It’s all right,” Patrick said in the taxi, although he wasn’t making eye contact. “It’s just a voicemail. It’s not like you did something illegal.” It was the first time he had lied to her.
Gigi didn’t even let them in the building. “My actors need to have self-control,�
�� she was quoted saying a few days later. “I’m not interested in working with divas.” She never spoke to Win again, and Win’s role was unceremoniously given to someone else. Other roles she had been chasing folded, too. She and Patrick went from rushing between ten meetings per day to barely rustling up three in a week. Party invitations were revoked. Callbacks were retracted. The only people who wanted to talk to her were entertainment journalists who called incessantly and left simpering messages explaining that they just wanted her side of the story. A hive of photographers sprang up in front of her hotel, hoping to catch a glimpse of Whitman Tagore wading through the burning wreckage of her short career. That was why Marie came to her hotel, the first time they met. They held the meeting in Win’s suite to save her from having to step outside.
The first question Marie asked was if Win had spoken with other publicists. Win felt suddenly embarrassed to tell the truth: no, she had not. Before that week she had never considered needing one. Publicists were for reality TV stars scrambling for likes and views, or for influencers looking to sidestep the tough climb up to fame. Win was an actress. She was a professional. She almost said no when Patrick handed over Marie’s business card. Then a photographer called her a crazy bitch as she was getting into her taxi, and Win decided some principles weren’t worth dying for.
“I’ve looked into a couple,” she told Marie. “You’re the only one I’ve met in person.”
Marie nodded. “That’s good. It’s best to speak to as few people as possible, during a crisis period.”
A few weeks before, Win would have dismissed the idea of calling this a crisis. It seemed so petty. A stumbling relationship, infidelity, an untamed outburst. Now, Win only needed to switch the TV to an entertainment channel to confirm Marie’s assessment.
The View Was Exhausting Page 2