“What’s so funny?”
“Nothing, really.”
“It doesn’t seem like nothing.”
“Yeah,” Leo agreed, standing again. Staring up at him made Win seasick. “It’s just that I spent all that time pretending I was in love with you, and now I have to pretend that I’m not.”
Win’s breath caught in her throat. “Leo—”
“I’ll leave you to it,” Leo said, cutting her off. He plucked her cigarette from her fingers and stamped it out, replacing it with the freshly rolled one. Win stared at him, and raised it slowly to her mouth. She turned her face up, and Leo leaned down, hand close to her face but not touching, shielding the cigarette, lighting it with an easy flick. He turned to the door and nodded once more and left her alone in the cold.
She wasn’t sure how long she’d sat outside when Leo left her. The night sky was hazy orange with light pollution, and low-hanging clouds heavy with snow traipsed slowly overhead. It had been quiet and cold enough that she didn’t have to think about much, but she couldn’t stay there forever. She came back inside for lack of any better ideas, and because people would notice if she didn’t: Shift, who mattered, and Georgia Chilton, who mattered in a different way.
Shift was perched on the far corner of the wedding table. Win discarded Shift’s bag and Charlie’s jacket and went to join her, before she noticed that Shift was chatting to Georgia Chilton. She gave Georgia an absent smile and looped her arms around Shift’s shoulders, resting her chin on Shift’s head.
She’d thought Leo was angry at her. She thought she’d blown it with him for good, and she’d almost been relieved—there was no way to turn back to what was destroyed.
“Are you flaunting your height again?” Shift asked, laughing up at her.
“Never,” Win said. Her voice sounded almost normal. “You finished DJing?”
“I’ve been ousted.” Shift nodded over to where a couple of her musician friends were setting up amps. “Green Lantern are going to do a set.”
“Are they the screamo band?”
“No,” Shift said, with a tragic sigh that meant she’d lost a fight to Charlie. “Apparently the screamo band is not wedding appropriate.”
Georgia Chilton laughed. “Are you having fun, Whitman?”
“Oh yes,” Win said, vaguely aware that she sounded too polite, like she was commenting on the weather. “It’s a beautiful wedding.”
She looked over the crowd, trying to take it in as a spectacle. Danielle had been pulled over to the table of models, looking nervous but defiant. Shift’s mum was gesturing violently at Charlie’s father, who was beautiful and a staunch conservative. She seemed about two minutes away from punching him; Shift’s dad, watching, was smiling for the first time all day. Gum and Charlie had commandeered an abandoned table by the bar, Charlie resting his cheek on his palm and smiling while Gum fixed Charlie’s tie.
And Leo was leaning over Gum’s chair, a hand on his brother’s shoulder, murmuring in his ear. Gum seemed to be disagreeing, but half-heartedly. As Win watched, Leo straightened and passed a hand over his face. He looked exhausted.
Win was staring too obviously. Shift cleared her throat, and after a moment, Georgia said, “I thought I saw Leo come out the same door you did a little while ago.”
“What?” Win said, distracted. “I—yeah, we talked a bit…”
Georgia looked stunned, as though she hadn’t expected an answer, let alone a truthful one. Shift’s face went pinched with concern.
“Well,” Georgia said. She was speaking very carefully. “That must have been hard, with everything that’s been going on lately.”
“Talking to Leo isn’t hard,” Win said, eyes still on him. He straightened, squeezing Gum’s shoulder once more, and Charlie stood, too, face open with happiness, leaning in to hug him. “He’s always the best person in the world to talk to. Even when we’re fighting.”
“Win,” Shift said.
“Yeah,” Win said. Leo was leaving, making his way across the room. He had said his goodbyes. He didn’t look in their direction. He knew where she was, just the same as she knew where he was, both of their focuses attuned to the other. Something in Win was rising, huge and insurmountable.
“Win,” Shift repeated. “Are you about to upstage my wedding?”
“What?” Win said. Georgia’s eyes were wide. Shift was beginning to smile. “No, Shift, I would never—”
“Hmm,” Shift said. “Do you think maybe you should upstage my wedding?”
“I…” Win looked back across the floor. Leo had slung his jacket over his shoulder. He had a last round of backslapping hugs from the handsome young men at his table. He put his hands in his pockets and turned for the door.
“Whitman,” Georgia said, “Bill and I are only here to talk about Charlie and Shift. I want you to know that I won’t print anything you don’t want me to print.”
Win thought of the sea in Sussex that day, the sucker punch of the waves and the freezing cold, and the way they’d grabbed at each other’s wrists, trying to drag each other down.
“You can print whatever you like,” Win said.
Georgia looked shocked. Shift’s eyes were shining. Leo was halfway across the room.
“It doesn’t matter,” Win said. “I won’t read it. Leo!”
She followed after him, pushing past clumps of people and dodging a waiter, Shift’s brilliant, shocked laughter ringing out behind her. Music was still blaring, and Leo made his way without looking back, his shoulders slumped.
Win raised her voice. “Leo!”
Leo stopped and turned. He wasn’t the only one, but he was the only one Win was looking at: his face pale, quiet, like he wasn’t sure what she was going to do to him this time. But his eyebrows went up, a silent question. He’d help with whatever she needed. She only needed one thing.
Win stumbled, the direct ray of his attention as disquieting as ever. She didn’t know what to say; people were murmuring around her, and she saw more than one phone’s camera pointed in her direction. She wasn’t sure what was on her face.
“Leo,” she said again, feeling stupid, like there was nothing left in her but his name.
And Leo’s expression changed, the exhaustion dropping away, something startled and new and uncertainly triumphant taking its place. His mouth crooked up.
“Come on, then,” he said, barely raising his voice. Win slipped out of her heels and flew across the space between them and into his arms.
She almost leapt at him; he caught her tight, an arm around her waist, his hand in her hair, and she kissed him. They clung to each other. Win wound her arms around his neck, pressing as close as she could, and he half bent her over, tearing greedy kisses from her, rough enough to set her mouth buzzing. She fisted her hand in his collar, yanking him in. Something inside her was fitting into place, and everywhere else she was hot all over, like Leo was waking her up again, bringing her in out of the cold.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled, their noses bumping, words interrupted by kisses. “I’m sorry, I fucked it all up, I was stupid—”
“We can— There are going to be pictures,” Leo said, voice desperate, “should you call Marie—”
“Jesus, I’ve fucked you up, too,” Win said.
They both laughed, cracked down the middle. Leo kissed the corner of her mouth, the tip of her nose, her cheek, the end of her eyebrow in quick succession, hands trembling on her face. Behind them there was a shimmering twist of chords as the band started up, and Win was grateful—Shift must have hurried them on to distract attention—but didn’t turn.
“Marie will deal. Everyone can deal. I’m so in love with you, I can’t lose you—”
“You’ve got me,” Leo said, and tilted her up to his mouth.
Epilogue
PLAYING TO WIN
Emily Wickham, New York Times Magazine
“It’s weird to be back in California,” Whitman Tagore says, leaning over the pool table to line up her shot.
“I forgot how friendly everyone is.” She flashes her teeth at me in a grin. “To your face, at least.”
The surprise announcement that Whitman is a nominee for Best Actress at this year’s Oscars probably helps, I say.
“Well,” she says. “It doesn’t hurt.”
It’s a relief to find her in good humor. Whitman Tagore doesn’t give many interviews, and I was late to meet her. She sent me an address on Crenshaw Boulevard where I spent ten minutes pacing outside what looked, frankly, like a shitty dive bar: a heavy door thick with grease, neon lights spelling out PABST and MILLER LITE in headache-spurring blues and whites, a SAVE WATER DRINK BEER sticker slapped against the half-closed aluminum shutters. I was peering in through layers of filth on glass and wondering if I’d fallen for an elaborate prank, when the door creaked open and Whitman Tagore leaned out.
“Come on in,” she said. “It’s Tequila Tuesday.”
Accordingly, Whitman is drinking a syrupy margarita served from a slushie machine (she declares herself “addicted”), and it won’t take long before the first round of slammers arrives. Considering the occasion, Whitman is remarkably relaxed, scruffy in her street clothes with newly short hair curling around her jawline. She has been rushed back to the States for a new round of pre-Oscars promotion from her home in the South of France where she has lived for the past four years, half runaway and half exile. She must be jet-lagged but she doesn’t look it. After our first drinks, she challenges me to a game of pool. Considering we are meeting only days after her shock nomination, I was expecting her to be more—well, shocked.
But her surprise has taken the form of high delight, with a dash of wickedness. “I was expecting to pay for my sins for another decade or so, but I guess they let me out of the doghouse earlier than expected.”
“Ah,” I say. “We’re going to talk about it right away.”
Whitman leans over the table, her cue balanced, her face intent and focused. As she sinks the ball, she says, “Everyone’s always talking about it.”
It would be hard not to. Whitman’s personal life has captured the public imagination as much as—and sometimes more than—her filmography, but five years ago it exploded into a drama even she couldn’t control. Revelations that her longtime boyfriend Leo Milanowski was secretly married to indie musician Lila Gardner were compounded by Gardner’s additional, widely circulated accusations that Whitman and Leo had never been a real couple. Whitman’s career—never scandal-free—dive-bombed into the dirt. Directors, producers, critics, and the public turned away in scorn, and All Rivers Run, her immediate release after the news, flopped at cinemas. Friends flocked to denounce her; hip-hop star Riva Reed released a platinum single that began, “I say he’s a king even though he’s a bore/tongue tying while I’m lying like my last name’s Tagore.”
Whitman’s response to the scandal was an erratic mix of silence and shameless PDA. She gave no interviews, made no appearances, went quiet on all social media, and accepted her censure without protest. At the same time, she was regularly photographed with Leo, as though she hadn’t noticed her elaborate fiction falling apart. Even now, she has never protested her innocence.
“It was a shit time,” Whitman tells me. “It really felt like I had lost everything. And then when I realized I hadn’t, that there was more for me than everything my life had centered on for a decade, that was also kind of terrifying. But, you know, it was a weird year. It was awful. It felt endless. And at the same time it was the happiest I’d ever been.”
It’s been a rocky road back into the public’s graces since Whitman’s weird year. Cast an eye over her output immediately after the scandal, and there’s little of note. A handful of independent films, most of them pretentious flops; a bit part in ensemble comedy RISK, which relied too heavily on fourth-wall wink-wink jokes; a gesture of reconciliation about as transparent as plastic wrap via her cameo in a Lila Gardner music video, which featured an artillery assault in pastel tones, Gardner ramming a baby-blue army tank through the gates of Whitman’s storybook mansion. She failed to land any meaningful roles, and while her few remaining fans were distraught, the majority of commentators agreed that it served her right.
It was around this time that Whitman first considered a switch to TV. Sick of ramming her head against the closed doors of Hollywood, she started hunting through pilot scripts and, late one night over a bottle of red, found Inter Alia. She stayed up until dawn reading and making notes, and at 7 a.m., she put in a call to showrunner Omar Shahbazi.
“It was definitely an unconventional pitch,” Shahbazi tells me. “She said, ‘Omar, everyone hates me, I’m toxic, and every time I try to fix it, I make it worse. I’m perfect for this role.’ I was trying to be professional and tell her, ‘Yeah, let’s meet, run some lines,’ and at the same time I’m waving the team over, like, whisper-screaming, ‘Fucking Whitman Tagore is on the phone.’”
HBO’s acclaimed comedy-drama stars Whitman as foul-mouthed, over-sexed Cleveland district attorney Mita Khan (with a spot-on midwestern accent). Early promo for the show leaned into Whitman’s position as Hollywood’s fallen angel and embraced her infamy. BAD REPUTATION, WORSE LITIGATION, the first teaser screamed, over a picture of Whitman dressed as Lady Justice, a sword in one hand and scales heaped with cocaine in the other.
The show quickly attracted a cult following that exploded into the mainstream with its third season, for which Whitman picked up her first Emmy. It has been praised for its nuanced approach to the US legal system and is certainly more explicitly political than anything Whitman has done before. It was a surprising move from an actress of color who has never seemed particularly interested in talking about race.
“We can talk about race,” she says now. “What do you want to talk about?”
I pause, slightly thrown, then ask her if she thinks she’s been treated differently, as an Indian woman in a historically white industry.
“Yes,” Whitman says, and smiles neatly. “Next question?”
I point out that many people, including other people from the Indian diaspora, have felt that she’s ignored her own position as a British Indian celebrity, a major woman of color in the industry. She could have chosen to campaign, to make an impact, to clear the way for other women like her. She could have spoken for her community.
Whitman considers. “The thing is, I was seventeen when I won the BAFTA. I was twenty when I stopped being able to go out in public. I’ve got a bunch of people telling me the best way to help other Indian actors in this industry is to speak up, and another, louder group of people telling me I’ll only be useful if I shut up, and I’m also trying to keep my own head above water and not go crazy. That was why Inter Alia was such a revelation for me—working with a really diverse team of writers and actors, issues of race and power are always on the table. And we considered it from numerous angles and perspectives, putting these power structures under the microscope, but trying not to draw easy conclusions. That’s something I want to keep doing, aligning my work with my values, and not fighting to justify myself and please everybody by saying, or not saying, the right thing.”
If I were more cynical, I might argue that Whitman is still avoiding the point. Is “letting my work speak for itself” essentially a fancier way of saying “no comment”? Whitman is infamous for her layers of defense and disguise, and it was her ceaseless tinkering with her public profile that exiled her from Hollywood in the first place. She has a habit of changing her image to suit her latest project: hiking through Utah and frowning into the distance before her compelling, controversial role as a hell-raising Calamity Jane; summering on the French Riviera and drinking Sancerre at the races when she was aiming for a slot as a Hemingway heroine. In the dive bar, she’s wearing a battered black leather jacket, big around her shoulders, and a baseball cap tugged low—a classic Mita Khan look, the sort of outfit she’d wear to threaten a state’s witness or seduce a Mafia kingpin on the sly. It’s as though the real Whitman Tagore is hidden somewher
e deep beneath. Why is she so afraid to be herself?
Whitman’s smile is gentle and incredulous.
“Emily,” she says. “It’s just a jacket.”
It’s perhaps unsurprising that Whitman is willing to wade into these murkier discussions now, given the film that has catapulted her back into the spotlight. There was general outrage among English literature students and right-wing commentators when she was cast as Dorothea Brooke in Sophie Gammage’s lavish new production of Middlemarch. (if you’re GOING to make WHITMAN TAGORE a character in middlemarch at least know your shit enough to cast her as rosamond, one fan tweeted, referring to Middlemarch’s infamously manipulative antiheroine.) Casting an Indian actress as the pious, milk-skinned face of nineteenth-century English Puritanism seemed to move beyond colorblind casting and into straight lunacy.
“I don’t want to pretend it’s just a human story and I connect to the human individual in the text,” Whitman says. “That’s not true. It’s obviously a white story. But I think if you’re adapting a text like Middlemarch today, it’s worth interrogating why it has to stay so white. One of the things that struck me most about Dorothea is that she’s such an alien. Her sister doesn’t understand her, her guardian doesn’t understand her, her husband definitely doesn’t understand her. And even the man she’s in love with doesn’t understand her for a long time, he misinterprets her, he expects her to break out of circumstances that she can’t control. That didn’t feel so far away from me.”
Much of the public outcry about Whitman’s casting melted away when the film premiered at Cannes. Surrounded by an eclectic group of British talent, Whitman is staggering as Dorothea, bringing fresh life to a heroine routinely dismissed as boring. There is a moment, early in the film, when Dorothea goes to Rome and realizes that she has married the wrong man. She is standing in front of Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, and the camera moves slowly through the cathedral dripping in gold and marble before it stills in a wide shot that frames Whitman Tagore’s ravenous face against the agony of the saint. Something very minute changes in Dorothea’s expression, a flex of the jaw, a darkening of the eyes, and the effect is devastating. In my screening, the stern silver fox sitting next to me burst abruptly into tears.
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