The View Was Exhausting

by Mikaella Clements

  “Look, I won’t go,” Leo said. “If you think it’s going to be too soon, she’s your best friend, of course I won’t go. But I don’t understand how this is going to work. You’re just going to, what, avoid me for the next year?”

  Win’s face fell.

  Leo said, “Ah, fuck.”

  “Listen—”

  “I’m such a fucking idiot,” Leo said. “I just got it. You mean we’re done forever now, huh?”

  Win moved like she was going to come over to him, and then thought better of it. They stood staring at each other over the mess they’d made of the bed.

  “No matter what happens,” Win said, “no matter what we do, or how we do it, they’re going to say it’s part of my plan to fake date you for attention. That’s the story for as long as we’re even near each other. Every time we touch, every time I smile at you, it’s me doing it for my career, because I’m a bitch, or ruthless, or a slut, or brainless. Probably all of the above. That’s the new story.”

  “Win,” Leo said. He knew his voice was too rough. “This is fucked.”

  “I know,” Win said. She looked cracked open, ruined like he’d never seen her. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re just writing us off.”

  “My career is important,” Win said, the first light of anger dawning on her face. “Don’t you get that? Don’t you—”

  “I actually know perfectly well how important it is,” Leo snapped. “I’ve been a pretty major part of it for the last seven years, I’ve taken your career pretty fucking seriously. Why won’t you take me seriously? This is important, too!”

  “I know it is.”

  “Pick me,” Leo said. He felt sick. He didn’t think he’d ever experienced a moment like this in his life before. Everything was slipping through his fingers, and he couldn’t do anything except beg. “Fuck. I haven’t—I haven’t asked you for anything in a long time. Pick me.”

  “We fight all the time,” Win said.

  “So what?” Leo said. “So what?”

  “I’d have to be an idiot,” Win said, “to throw everything away on…We slept together last night. I don’t know how this is going to turn out—”

  “I don’t, either,” Leo said. “Pick me.”

  “You can’t ask me to choose you over my career.”

  “Why not?” Leo said. “I know it’s important. I’ll help you however I can. But this is important, too. You and me.”

  “I know that.” Win’s phone buzzed in her hand and she looked down at it, tired, almost absent.

  This was what she’d meant, the whole time; this was the way the world worked differently for her. There was no carefully written apology, no cutesy who, me? smile that could fix it. For once, Leo couldn’t flex his position and have the media fall into line. God, the gibes about arranged marriages alone, Leo thought, and had to bite down a hysterical laugh. Win had been trying to tell him all along, and he, selfishly, only understood it now when it applied to him, now that he was, for the first time, going to suffer from the rules she’d been maneuvering herself around for years.

  “Listen.” Leo folded his arms so his hands didn’t shake. He couldn’t let her walk out of the room. He knew, from the resolute set of her exhausted, sad face, that if she left, she wouldn’t come back. “I know I’ve been an asshole. I didn’t understand and I didn’t listen to you, I’ve been acting like you live in the same world as me and you don’t. I get it now. I’m really sorry. But I can’t, I can’t lose you.”

  “Leo,” Win said, her face shocked, blown open. “I’m not doing this to punish you.”

  “So stay. It’ll be bad, but we’ll manage it. It’ll be okay. We can move to some shithole in the Midlands and you can act in community theater—” Win laughed, watery, and Leo went on, “—and introduce your mum to my mums and—and have roast dinner at the pub, and we’ll be so boring everyone will stop paying attention to us.”

  “I love my job,” Win said, “and you and me have never made it work. Not once.”

  “We’ve never tried,” Leo said.

  “Maybe this will be easier for you,” Win said, voice wavering. “You won’t have all my shit dragging you down, or me yelling at you about how you don’t understand.”

  Leo wanted to laugh and couldn’t. “That sounds awful.”

  “It’s good for you,” Win said. “You can do what you want now.”

  “Fuck you,” Leo said. “I only want one thing.”

  Win looked at him. She looked like someone going into battle for the last of several frays, weary and travel-stained. Her hair was messy from his hands in it. When she took a step toward him, Leo jerked backward. He didn’t want her to touch him like this, didn’t want to watch her say goodbye. He turned around, shoulders tight, hot misery building in his chest like a howl, and he didn’t see her leave, though he heard the door close behind her.

  Montreal

  Chapter Twenty

  It was Marie who booked the flight to Montreal, and she came with Win on the plane. Her expression was grim, her voice clipped. They went over the situation in clinical detail: The Sun Also Rises had dumped her, of course. The producers at Paramount were skittish as ever. The studio had already wasted months waiting for Win to finish tending to her mother and start filming, and the delay until winter had messed up their schedules. The widespread reports that Win was so desperate for publicity she’d break up a marriage were the last straw.

  She was also no longer in consideration for the thriller whose contract she’d been days away from signing, and Chanel had dropped her as their campaign lead. Patrick was trying to smooth things over, but there was a chance they would sue her for breach of contract; one clause had promised reliable, upstanding behavior as a brand ambassador. Win listened like a president being briefed on a series of military crises. She nodded at all the right moments.

  Then they made their plans. Originally Montreal was only meant to be a quick flyby so that Win could be there for the ceremony before escaping back to work. But suddenly Win’s schedule was wide open, like a deeply set valley without a bridge, and she arrived over a week before the wedding. It was only temporary, Patrick had already assured her. He sounded comforting and patient on the phone in a way that reminded Win of Pritha’s doctors at her worst stages. They all agreed it would blow over, especially if Win was never so much as even photographed with Leo again. Producers weren’t stupid; Win’s name on a billboard would still significantly raise a film’s profile, and she had proved herself an asset on set. Hardworking, focused. Free from distractions. She had cried only once since the news broke.

  Emil called when she was at the airport, waiting to board. His voice was quiet and comforting, and he didn’t bother with platitudes that he knew she wouldn’t believe, just told her that he was on his way to the East Sussex house to pick up her things. Marie had decided it was best not for Win to go back and get them herself, and she’d had to say goodbye to her mum on the phone.

  Pritha’s voice had been sleepy and confused, and she’d asked if Win was okay. “Ma,” Win said, and felt her voice break. She sobbed for two awful minutes while Pritha said uselessly, “Whitman. Oh, shona,” until Win said she had to go. Her eyes still stung. She had to stop thinking about it.

  “Thank you,” she told Emil instead, looking over the airfield, tracking the swoop of departing planes. She tried to inject some humor into her strained voice. “Sorry you’ve ended up caught in all my Hollywood shit. If you want out, I totally understand.”

  Emil didn’t laugh, as she’d expected. He was quiet, and then he said, “Thank you, Win. I’m glad you said that.”

  She listened to his resignation in numb silence. He swore it was nothing personal. “It’s just—the situation is too unstable for me,” he said. “I’m not as tough as you, or Marie—although you can’t ever tell her I said that. And I’ll serve a notice period, of course, as long as you need.” Win wanted to argue with him, but she didn’t know what to say. He was right to resign. He w
as ambitious, and she was a toxic entity with nothing to offer him by way of reassurance except money, which he could get elsewhere. Marie bristled and called him a coward, but Win understood.

  After a lot of back-and-forth, Marie decided that Shift’s wedding would be a “good tone changer.” Win could hole up with Shift and be a dutiful bridesmaid, keeping out of view as much as she could without giving the impression of hiding. Win was relieved. She’d thought she would have to hide out from everyone and everything and worried that Marie would tell her to miss the wedding altogether. But Marie thought Win being a good friend in the background of a family ceremony would help, and the Vogue profile on Charlie was just the right amount of attention. It would be a signal that life was still moving, the world still turning, encouraging people to forget this mess. It was clear that Leo wouldn’t be there.

  After the wedding she would find a new project, something small and independent but with enough clout to remind people of her talent. Win would stay busy, and in a few months, once they’d decided how they wanted to frame the narrative, there would be a scripted confessional interview, a few self-deprecating jokes, a new boyfriend. Win just needed to stay cool, and quiet, and as far away from Leo as possible.

  Lila had posted to Twitter only once in the last seventy-two hours, brief and vague: lol…believe what u want to believe. It had been retweeted hundreds of thousands of times, her follower count climbing, her name trending alongside Win’s and Leo’s. Win wondered if she’d even noticed.

  “It wouldn’t hurt her to come out with an apology,” Marie said as she scanned through the in-flight menu. Win hadn’t been able to eat since their early morning coffees. “You don’t think, if I reached out to—”

  “No,” Win said. “That won’t be happening.”

  “Okay.”

  “I mean it,” Win said. “Don’t go behind my back on this one.”

  Marie looked offended. She leaned back from Win in her seat, plush leather creaking. “You know I’ll never contact him without asking you first.”

  “Unless you decide you know better than me,” Win said, filled with a kind of reckless righteousness, still stinging from the call with Emil. She thought of Leo’s admission in the gallery. I thought maybe I could help, he’d said, disconsolate and annoyed at having to admit it, and Win had felt it, then, the first real stirrings of danger. Something worse than the way they’d been fighting. Something less manageable. “You let me think that he—”

  “I’m your publicist, Whitman,” Marie said. “I can’t be your relationship guru as well.”

  “You should have told me,” Win said.

  “You should have told me you were in love with him,” Marie said.

  Win shut her mouth on a tiny noise. She felt like she’d been punched in the gut. She had never told Marie why Leo had been there first thing in the morning when Marie called. But she supposed she shouldn’t be surprised that Marie had worked it out.

  Marie softened. “I would have found another way, if I’d known.”

  “Well.” Win’s voice was very small. “I didn’t know, either.” But dwelling on it wouldn’t do any good, even if it was all she could think about, the awful realization that had come too late. “What did he—what did he say when he called you in September?”

  She tried to pull the gray memories of two months ago into focus. Her anger had cut her off from everyone, like she was locked away in a tower. Then Marie had texted her, Turn on Radio 1, and everything had gone to shit.

  Marie hesitated. “He said it wasn’t fair that you were on your own.”

  Win turned her face to the window. Below the sleek wing of the plane, there were only clouds, harshly white and rolling away as far as she could see.

  Win was at Shift’s house for two days before they talked about it.

  She wondered if Shift was restraining herself from saying I told you so. But she just asked Win quietly if she’d already known about the divorce.

  “No,” Win said. Her mouth twitched. She wasn’t sure if she was going to laugh or cry. “I think he thought it was going to be a nice surprise.”

  Shift’s eyebrows went up, almost disappearing under her bangs. She had started wearing her hair in a high messy bun, which made her look like a beloved high school art teacher. “Would it have been a good surprise?”

  “Yes,” Win said. She paused. “I would have been happy, I think.”

  “Oh, babe,” Shift said.

  For a long time Win had wrestled with her thoughts about Lila. She had spent months hating her, and feeling cruel for hating her, since it was Leo’s fault, and it wasn’t like Win had ever really had a claim on him. Then, at home, with Leo so close and her mother so sick, Lila had been like a phantom, reappearing late at night on Leo’s phone or in a skipped heartbeat whenever Marie called, or more and more when Leo looked at her, when he drew closer, when he made her mum laugh, when he ran by her side, and Win thought: Married, he’s married. On the final night in London, the last thoughts of Lila had burst like lazy fireworks, and Win had allowed herself to forget that Lila existed. Clearly, that had been a mistake.

  Once, at her mum’s house when Win had still been so furious with Leo she couldn’t even speak to him, she’d spent an evening watching videos of Lila. She’d felt absurdly guilty, especially with Leo somewhere in the house, sulking in his room and on the phone to one of his siblings or even to Lila herself. She’d felt paranoid, like she was fifteen again and smoking a secretive cigarette before her mum got home.

  In interviews, Lila was rude and quick-witted and untroubled. She hung back more than Win would have expected and let the rest of the band answer questions, smirking in the background and occasionally correcting them when she disagreed. Once an interviewer hinted that being a band with a front woman made it easier to get gigs, because venues had to fill their quotas. “Blow me,” Lila replied, and walked off camera without turning back. Win had thought, with a stirring of jealousy that wasn’t all about Leo, She says exactly what she thinks all the time, that girl has no filter at all, and wondered if that was what Leo wanted. But the next morning she woke to the sounds of Leo and Pritha making breakfast together, getting ready for another endless soap opera marathon, and realized she didn’t have any idea what Leo wanted.

  Win was forcing herself to call Pritha once a day. Every day she came up with new excuses not to do it, and every day she propped her head in her hand at Shift’s crowded kitchen table and called the house in East Sussex. Pritha knew something had gone wrong, even if she didn’t completely understand the mechanics. Win tried to tell the truth about how bad things were, though she was wary of stressing Pritha out. It made it worse that Pritha herself was dead center of the scandal this time. Their strategy of an appealingly tragic Win had backfired. It was public knowledge that Win had continued the charade even while her mother was being ferried in and out of hospital rooms, flaunting her mother’s illness for sympathy points.

  It was a physical effort for Win to loosen her resolve on the phone, the recurring embarrassment of getting to the age of twenty-seven and not knowing how to talk to her mother. But she told Pritha everything: Chanel dropping her, the Hemingway project gone, the producers who had stopped returning Patrick’s calls. Leo’s face in the blue of the morning. Pritha was still incredulous that anyone really cared about Win’s private life, let alone Leo’s—but she was patient on the phone. She didn’t interrupt. A romantic crisis seemed to baffle her, and she didn’t mention Leo, but she talked about other things. She told Win she was recovering well; her sister was coming down to visit in a few days. The cat was back to terrorizing seagulls in the garden. “Try not to worry so much,” she said, a few days after Win had left. “I think you’re handling things very well.” Win hung up almost shivering with relief.

  * * *

  Shift had announced that all wedding planning activities were confined to the garage, and the kitchen and living room were strictly off-limits for flowers, confetti, or tulle. In reality the
whole house looked like it had been invaded by an overeager events company. Shift was exasperated by the clutter, and had a habit of knocking things over as she passed them, scattering sugared almonds over the floor or nudging piles of sample menus off the side of the couch. Three times already Win had witnessed Shift drag the seating chart out of the room, cursing, only for Charlie to cheerfully drag it back in a few minutes later.

  “I’m sorry I’ve turned your wedding week into this,” Win said. She nodded in the direction of the front door, the blinking shafts of camera flashes through the mottled glass.

  “It was always going to be a bit like this,” Shift said. “And Charlie loves it, anyway. Last night he asked me if he should take out some tea and coffee for them.”

  “He’s too nice for his own good.”

  Charlie proved her point when he came bounding into the living room half an hour later and expressed his deep, heartfelt gratitude to Win for helping to make the last few seating cards, something he confessed he had been “really worried about.”

  It was only when Charlie had pulled Win into a tight hug in Shift’s hallway on the night of her arrival that Win realized she barely knew him, had met him just a few times, rarely for longer than an hour. Most of Win’s time with Shift was snatched when their schedules collided, which meant while Shift was touring through cities where Win was filming. Win would attend concerts and watch Shift leap around, self-contained and wild at the same time under the strobe lights, or else Shift would meet her for breakfast at dawn, when Win had already been up filming for three hours and was due back on set for another twelve. Win had always been secretly proud of herself for finding the time.

  Over the last few days she had barely seen Charlie, who was busy with wedding errands and outings to scenic locations with his Vogue profiler. Now he pulled a carefully folded scrap of paper from his wallet and said, “Look, we made Hello! Canada.”