When I walked out of that club with Jones, I think it was the crazy bitches I wanted to wound. In my drunken grandiosity, I imagined I had the power to bring their worlds crashing down. But like any idiot could have predicted, the bitches weathered the trauma just fine. It was my own sandcastle I was kicking over, of course, stomping it into nice, hard, flat, empty beach.
The tagline for the first film was Love once, love forever. For the fourth film, my last, it was Fall once, fall forever. On the poster, a photoshopped, brooding Oliver and a photoshopped, pouty me were superimposed on a beautiful but ominous digital city, its skyline of gold onion domes dusted with snow. What will be the tagline for the sixth film? The tenth? Die already, for the love of god, die forever?
Gwendolyn keeps writing. There are seven books now. But even before I got fired, Oliver and I were aging faster than our characters. We couldn’t be them forever. Or, I couldn’t keep being Katerina. Everyone knows men don’t get old, at least not in a way that matters. They’re filming the fifth one now. The girl who replaced me is a teenager.
The creepy thing is, Oliver and I had first fucked in a car. But it was after the Kids’ Choice Awards, not a premiere. The first Archangel movie won everything the kids could choose to award it. Has there ever been a bigger lie than I only want you? Or forever? Who was the first person to say that nothing lasts forever? Who was the first to notice that nothing does?
Two
The morning after I went home with Jones, Oliver’s stuff was gone from my house. My bodyguard and assistant said that his bodyguard and assistant had come over in the middle of the night to collect everything after the first pictures showed up online. I’d been home for five minutes when my agent, Siobhan, called to check in and politely inquire what I could possibly have been thinking. In the afternoon she called back to relay a partial list of people who were upset with me. She herself was on it—that was implied, although she didn’t yell at me the way she would have back in the early days, when we were both psyched out of our minds if I landed a commercial for microwaveable pizza dumplings. Last year I made $32 million, and she gets ten percent. When you’re as famous as I am, you’re like an immense, gliding sea creature, an ecosystem of your own, feeding a colony of small fry on whatever’s left over in your teeth.
Alexei Young, Oliver’s agent, whom I’d had sex with twice, secretly, and might still be in love with, told Siobhan that Oliver was heartbroken and devastated, which Siobhan relayed to me. The general entity of The Studio was upset and specifically the head of The Studio, Gavin du Pré, to whom I’ve given one blow job and not because I wanted to. The investors were upset, as was Gwendolyn-the-author-of-the-Archangel-books and also the director who’d done the fourth movie, which was in postproduction, and the guy who was slated to direct the fifth.
“The studio,” Siobhan said, “is concerned that people—the fans—are taking this news very personally. The studio is worried you’ve punctured the romantic illusion. Obviously this whole franchise hinges on this idea of perfect love and the thinking is—”
I interrupted. “It’s really not my fault if people are too stupid to tell the difference between reality and a story.”
“Yes, I agree, in theory, but I do think an argument could be made that we all have a responsibility to protect the brand. I can’t really claim to anyone that you haven’t pulled focus from the movie.”
I didn’t say anything.
She said, “Have you talked to Oliver yet?”
“No. But, by the way, he cheated, too. I told you about that.”
“But it never really leaked. If a tree cheats in the woods and nobody takes its picture…listen, I’m not judging, but you could have been more discreet. Let me rephrase. You couldn’t have been less discreet. This was the PR equivalent of a suicide bombing.” She paused. “Was it just a rogue impulse?”
“Isn’t everything?”
She didn’t say anything.
“You want to know why,” I said. “I don’t know why. Jones is a douche.”
“Don’t say that to anyone in the press. Okay. Look, what’s done is done. Everyone just wants an update, some clue about which way you guys are leaning so we can start to spin things.”
“You mean are Oliver and I getting back together?”
“Yes.”
A guffaw flew from my mouth as though someone had Heimliched it out.
“Okay,” she said. “Well. One last thing. Gwendolyn is upset enough that the studio is getting even more upset on her behalf.”
“Fuck Gwendolyn. Seriously.”
“She’s very protective of her creation—”
“I am not her creation. She’s not God.”
“No, but her franchise has made you and me and a lot of other people a lot of money. All she wants is to meet. Gavin du Pré personally requested that you meet with her and smooth her feathers.”
“I’m busy this week.”
“No, you’re not.”
I hung up on Siobhan. This lacked gravitas on a smartphone, jabbing at a picture of a button. For a while I lay in bed smoking weed and watching a reality show where face-lifts in Hervé Léger bandage dresses slop martinis around and talk shit on each other. Some of these women have had so much work done their words come out all mushy because they can’t move their lips. With their spooky round eyes and stubby little snouts, they look like cats transformed into humans by an incompetent wizard.
I wondered if I could spend the rest of my life lying around this house, watching TV. I wondered how long it would take for the morning glory to grow over the windows, sealing me in.
I’d been on the verge of being cast in Archangel when Gavin du Pré set down his coffee cup at our breakfast meeting and very quietly and politely asked me to stand up and take off my clothes.
I was surprised for half a second and embarrassed about being dumb enough to have been surprised ever after. We were alone in a hotel suite in Beverly Hills, facing each other across a little white-draped table laden with a silver coffee service and a multi-tiered stand of miniature quiches and tarts and croissants that Gavin had kept telling me to eat before he asked me to get naked. “I promise you won’t get fat from one little croissant,” he’d said. “Look how tiny it is. Just have a taste. A taste won’t hurt you.”
It wasn’t like I hadn’t encountered creeps before. They’re on every set and in every executive hierarchy like they’re mandated by some sort of local creeps union. But the stakes had never been so high, not even close. This is a game changer, Siobhan and I had said to each other when the meeting got scheduled. I’ve never figured out if she knew what she was sending me into. She’d gone out of her way to mention Gavin was married and had daughters around my age—eighteen, then.
Gavin was an inoffensive-looking, beigey, fiftyish guy with full, pale lips and wire-rimmed glasses and pocket squares that artfully complimented his ties. “I need to get a look at you,” he said, and I decided to understand that as a professional need, not a personal one.
I never told Siobhan because I didn’t want her to know I’d actually done it. My uncle Mitch had been dead for a couple of months then, and even though he’d never exactly been “involved” or “protective,” I had a new, hard feeling of aloneness. I hadn’t even hesitated. I’d stood there naked in front of Gavin, and I turned in a little circle when he asked me to, and when he took out his dick and asked me to please suck it, I did.
* * *
—
The day after the day after Jones Cohen, I was lying by my pool watching a vulture circle. The sky in L.A. is full of vultures, sometimes great big spiraling tornadoes of them towering up into the clouds, only people usually don’t look. I was a little surprised, almost insulted, that there weren’t any helicopters spying on me. Were the paparazzi allowed to use those little hobbyist drones? Maybe not, because they would if they could. That should be ins
cribed over their coat of arms: We Would if We Could.
The doorbell startled me. I thought the paps must have climbed my gate, decided to storm the house. It rang again. I waited for my assistant, Augustina, to deal with it until I remembered I’d sent her home, urgently pressing a packet of edibles into her hand even though she doesn’t like weed. My bodyguard, M.G., was patrolling the perimeter. I heaved myself up, went and looked at the security screen. My neighbor, the venerable Sir Hugo Woolsey (Venerable, venal, venereal, he says), was leaning close to the camera, waving a bottle of Scotch and shouting “Chicken soup for the philanderer’s soul!” into the intercom like he didn’t trust it to actually transmit or amplify his voice. Hugo dresses like a hipster Nebuchadnezzar and lives with his young and beautiful boyfriend, so it always surprises me when he does old-person stuff with technology.
“Hey,” I said, opening the door. “How’d you get past the gate?”
“You gave Rudy the code ages ago. Don’t you remember? He was making a little delivery.” He mimed pulling on a joint. Hugo’s boyfriend Rudy’s principal responsibilities in life were to keep it tight and to stay current on the best weed available citywide, medical or otherwise. “It’s mayhem down there,” he said, sweeping into the kitchen. “M.G. ought to have a bullwhip to crack at them.”
He was wearing huaraches and drawstring pants in blue-and-white ikat and an orange linen shirt unbuttoned to show a bear-claw necklace nestled in his thick white chest hair. Hugo is tall and impressively burly for someone over seventy and has a sonorous, plummy voice and the world’s most impressive stage pedigree.
He poured us each a tumbler of Scotch. “Cin cin.” We clinked. “Rudy says the internet is burning. He says you set it on fire.”
“It deserved it,” I said, following him into the largest of my living rooms.
He sat on the couch and gestured me imperiously into one of my own chairs. “Oh, I agree.”
I raised my glass. “Thanks for this. It’s really good.”
“Truly exceptional, you mean, and you’re welcome. It wasn’t like I was going to drink it with Rudy. It would be wasted on that palate. Might as well give it to a child. I wanted to be sure you were dulling your pain in style.”
“I’m focusing more on opiates.”
“Please don’t have a meltdown. That would be dreadfully dull of you. And a terrible waste of talent, of course.”
“I was kidding,” I said. “But obviously I’m already in the middle of a meltdown.”
“No, no, no. Jones was the meltdown. Now you’re rebounding.”
“It’s been”—I calculated—“thirty-nine hours.”
“This, my dear, is a golden opportunity to—I hate the word, but in this case it’s apt—reinvent yourself. If you can’t see how you might seize this particular moment, then you have no imagination at all, and I am extremely disappointed in you.”
“I don’t really see how to capitalize on everyone hating me.”
The crazy bitches had tweeted at me that I was a slut, a whore, a cunt. I deserved to die, they said, to be alone forever, to rot in hell. Thank God Oliver was free of me, they said. Men jumped in to tell me I was ugly and unfuckable but also that I deserved to be raped, that I was going to choke to death on their dicks. They didn’t even care about Archangel. They just couldn’t pass up an opportunity to tell a woman that (a) they’d never fuck her and also (b) they were going to fuck her until she died. I’d scrolled. I was hanging in the stocks so the village could come by and jeer at me. I had committed an act of terrorism as far as the crazy bitches were concerned. I had attacked their way of life. The bitches said IN ALL CAPS that they wanted me to suffer, to be obliterated. But really they wanted me to fix it, to undo what I’d done, to return them to the way they were before.
Every once in a while, someone would be like, hey, stay strong, girl, and that was enough to make me tear up. Then someone else would say it was my fault Mitch had overdosed or that my parents were lucky they were dead so they wouldn’t have to be ashamed of me.
“Not everyone hates you,” Hugo said, “just the—what do you call them? The crazy bitches? Most people don’t care at all about Archangel and therefore don’t care at all about you. Don’t look like that—it’s a good thing. The worthwhile people probably think you just got more interesting, showed a little backbone. Not that Oliver isn’t a nice boy, a gorgeous boy, but he’s too vacuous for you. Of course I understand the appeal of the beautiful, vacuous boy. Rudy isn’t what you would call complicated, but, you know, I’m old. I want someone young and frivolous whose most profound and complicated desire is for fun, specifically fun that is purchasable with money. That’s an important distinction. Do you know how few people can actually be made genuinely happy by money? It’s really quite rare. Rudy is what suits me now, but when I was your age I wanted something fraught and epic that could”—he bared his teeth and mimed ripping something in half—“tear me apart.” His famous voice echoed off the ceiling.
I wanted to tell him about Alexei, but Hugo gossips.
I said, “I haven’t heard a peep from Oliver. He hasn’t called to scream at me or anything. Just silence. My agent says his agent says he’s devastated. But he cheated on me with at least one actress and at least one model and God knows who else, and I got over it. This whole heartbroken act is a bit much.”
He waved a hand in dismissal then leveled his most piercing gaze at me and asked, “What drew you to Oliver in the first place?”
“Have you seen Oliver?” Hugo pierced harder. I said, “He was the only one who understood what it was like to live through the whole Archangel thing. You know how people say you should choose someone you’d want to be in a foxhole with? But this was like, what if you’re in a foxhole already, and someone else happens to be in there, too? Then you have the foxhole in common, which is not nothing.” I drained my glass. Hugo went to the kitchen and came back with the bottle.
“And then?” he said, pouring. “Did the foxhole lose its luster?”
“He became part of the claustrophobia.”
Hugo draped one arm elegantly along the back of the sofa, his drink dangling from his fingertips. “Forget love. My dear, I’m a self-absorbed old narcissist, not your nanny, so I don’t care all that much what you do. Mostly I’m here because I can’t resist meddling. But as someone who’s made many rather impressive messes over the years, if I do say so myself, I believe I am uniquely well qualified to advise.”
“This is different.”
“I beg your pardon. How so?”
“You’re a man, for starters, and there wasn’t an internet when you were being chaotic.”
“You’re right. It’s been a very simple thing being me.” He glowered. “I almost married a woman once. A woman!”
“Disgusting.”
“Let me ask you, what is the worst possible outcome of all this?”
“Endless public shaming. I get fired from Archangel and never work again.”
“It wouldn’t be endless. People will move on sooner than you think. They don’t really care. And you don’t need to work again. You’re extremely rich. You could quit and go buy a winery somewhere. A goat farm. An island. Simplify. Live in peace. What do you want?”
My mind went blank, scrabbly and darting like a panicked animal. All I could think was that I didn’t want to keep feeling the way I felt. I wanted to feel good. An image came to me of myself holding an Oscar aloft, an auditorium of people on their feet, applauding me. “I want more,” I said. “Not less. I want to work.”
He narrowed his eyes, said in a low growl, “Good girl. There’s no reason you shouldn’t have more.”
“Well,” I said, “there are actually a few. No one in Hollywood cares I was unfaithful to Oliver, but they’ll care I was unfaithful to the brand.”
He groaned extravagantly. “You need to get outside this idea of brand
s. It’s so tiresome. Even if this hadn’t happened, I would have told you to quit. What’s the alternative? You keep doing Archangel until you’re too old and they quietly shunt you aside for someone younger? At least now you’ve established yourself as interesting and unpredictable, not some comely young automaton. Everyone will be looking to see what you do next. You’re not their pawn anymore. And people love a comeback.”
Three
When I was a teenager wreaking havoc, my uncle Mitch offered to take me on a trip, just us, anywhere I wanted. He thought it would be good for me to get away; he was between projects anyway. I chose Lake Superior, where my parents’ plane had vanished.
“Isn’t that a little morbid?” Mitch said.
I told him I just wanted to see it. And I did—I always had—but I also wanted to go somewhere where we wouldn’t do our usual stuff. Some fancy tropical resort wouldn’t have been a vacation because we would have just run around getting drunk and finding people to hook up with. Decadence was what I needed a break from.
We started in Sault Sainte Marie and drove clockwise all the way around, thirteen hundred miles in a rented soft-top Jeep Wrangler, the noisy discomfort of which was a just punishment for us being too cool for an economy sedan. I swam every day even though the water nearly strangled me with cold. I kept thinking about the sunken Cessna out there somewhere, wondering if infinitesimal particles of my parents were floating around me like fireflies.
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