“Wallace,” Addison interrupted, “is there somewhere we could go to swim?”
“Swim?”
“Yes.”
“Let me think.” Wallace slowed the car, wanting to please. Not the Clark Fork or the Bitterroot, not at night. An idea came. “There might be somewhere.” He turned west, presently steered onto a gravel track that became a dirt lane. Trees grew alongside, though not densely, and the air was cool. A leaping deer, caught in the headlights, seemed to float over the rutted track and was gone. Addison winced as they jounced and rattled, and Wallace had to fight the urge to apologize. As though this expedition had been his idea, as though any of it were his idea.
He had never wanted children, never wanted to be anything other than a bachelor, and yet he had not hesitated to respond in the affirmative to Chester Fine’s telegrammed question, to take in two babies who would grow into two children who would occupy his house, his time, some portion of his attention. He had swept his seedier appetites to the edges of his life, mostly out of sight. Willingly, he had done all this. He had studied Jamie and Marian for clues about the character of his own brother, whom he had never known well. He wondered if Marian’s obstinacy was from her father or from the mythical Annabel, wondered who had bequeathed Jamie his almost debilitating horror of animal suffering. The boy was undone by birds fallen from the nest, injured rabbits, stray dogs, whipped horses. Cruelty was inextricable from life, Wallace tried to explain, but Jamie was not easily persuaded or consoled. No mystery why there were seldom fewer than five dogs in the house.
Though Wallace was eager to have Addison take a share of responsibility for the children, he’d also been surprised by his pleasure that Addison had (tersely) accepted his offer to stay in the cottage after his release and by his relief that Addison did not plan to take Jamie and Marian away immediately. He hadn’t realized he was afraid of losing them.
The lane ended at a shallow grassy rise, the headlights angling up off the top into nothing. “There’s a little pond down there,” Wallace said, turning off the engine. An insect cacophony welled up.
Addison got out and folded his jacket on the seat, set his hat on top, walked toward the water. Wallace followed. It was only a little oxbow pond, a silty crescent left behind when the river had changed course. The moon floated in its fat middle. Addison began to jerk at his tie, tugging at the knot and yanking it off over his head as though escaping a hangman’s noose. He shed his shirt with the same feverishness. In the moonlight Wallace could see the knobs of his spine, the shadows under his shoulder blades. Addison pried off his shoes, peeled off his socks, fumbled with his belt and the buttons at his waist until his trousers and drawers dropped around his ankles, revealing pale buttocks. He waded in on knobby heron’s legs. As the water rose around his calves, something seemed to break in him, and he charged like a maddened beast, splashing and galloping, diving under. The dog chased after him, barking.
Wallace shed his clothes and followed more deliberately, the pond bottom sucking at his feet. He took a breath and sank under the surface. Surfacing, he found he could stand on his toes, but only just. Addison was floating with his arms out, his chest breaking the surface, looking at the sky. The dog’s V-shaped wake disturbed the moon.
“Is this all right? Is it what you wanted?” Wallace asked.
“I haven’t wanted anything for years,” Addison said. “But then I wanted to swim.”
* * *
—
Over the more than nine years he had spent in Sing Sing, Addison had slept very little. His cell, seven feet by three feet, made from limestone quarried by prisoners long since dead, was a tomb in which, after lights-out, he lay perfectly still, perfectly awake, listening to the snores and murmurs and masturbatory rhythms of the eight hundred men stacked six high in cells identical to his. On ships, he had always been able to sleep, no matter how rough the seas or uncomfortable his berth. In prison, the persistence of his consciousness had seemed a particularly severe aspect of his punishment, meted out not by the court but by his soul.
Addison did not sleep in the cottage either, did not wrinkle the white sheets or the blue-and-white quilt on the narrow bed made up by the famous Berit. He’d found a number of crates and boxes stacked inside. Wallace said they were for him, had arrived by freight a year or two after he had entered Sing Sing. Chester Fine’s name was on the shipping labels. After closing the curtains, Addison pried open a crate at random. It was full of books—his books—from the house in New York. Others held the things he had collected on his journeys: masks and carvings, animal horns, weavings, a tortoise shell, a serving tray from Brazil with butterfly wings arranged in iridescent wheels under glass. Elsewhere, carefully wrapped and padded, Addison found the paintings Wallace had made in New York and given him in lieu of rent. Docked ships. Crowded streets. The Hudson. The redbrick townhouse.
The prosecutors had conceded that Captain Graves had not, strictly speaking, broken any law by surviving, but they pointed out that the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea required the captain to stay aboard until all passengers had been safely seen to, otherwise he was guilty of gross negligence. Furthermore, Graves had brandished a deadly weapon to prevent passengers—women, even—from boarding the lifeboat, which could be construed as second degree murder. Five hundred and eight people had died, passengers and crew, burned or drowned or floating dead from cold in their life jackets. The leading theory was that a fire smoldering in a coal bunker had ignited the coal dust that floated and drifted everywhere belowdecks, triggering a violent blast in one of the boilers, which had blown out the starboard hull.
At most, Chester Fine countered, Captain Graves took the place of one person in the boat, and he was, after all, carrying his own infant twins, a son and daughter. Who among us could judge a man for saving his own children?
Who then, said the prosecutors, ultimately, was responsible for the explosion? And who was responsible for the competence of the crew? Who was responsible for the safety and soundness of the ship? Who?
I alone was responsible, Addison told Chester Fine. He asked him to plead guilty to everything, not to bargain against his atonement. But Chester, in his quiet, resolute way, ignored him. He said they must disregard public passions, which would fade. He said Addison would one day regret making a martyr of himself. And why save the twins only to abandon them again? A plea of manslaughter, everyone eventually agreed. Ten years up the Hudson.
So Addison had disappeared into Sing Sing with something like relief.
Wallace had sent a studio photograph taken on the twins’ first birthday: two babies in white dresses sitting gravely in a wingback chair, their wispy pale hair carefully combed. Sketched portraits came, too, washed with watercolor. Addison had never arrived at a settled conclusion about which twin was which and felt too foolish to ask. Every year on their birthday, another photo was sent, and slowly the babies morphed into long-limbed, extremely blond children. Marian, with her skeptical gaze and small, reluctant smile, bore a resemblance to Annabel that, coupled with Wallace’s stories of her willfulness, disturbed Addison. Jamie radiated earnest sweetness.
Some buried, occult part of him believed if he had not brought Annabel and the twins on board the Josephina, the explosion would not have occurred, though, really, he had little doubt Lloyd’s crates were to blame. Or that he himself was to blame for not demanding to know what they contained, for allowing Lloyd to wave a hand and say they would be too complicated to declare.
As the night faded to pewter, he inched open the curtain. The stars bowed out one by one in a way that seemed gracious, even courtly, and a memory swallowed him: dawn on the Josephina as a few stragglers in evening wear lingered on deck or receded down corridors, tipping, stumbling, sparkling. He felt the deck vibrating under his feet. He smelled the sea.
No, it was pond water he smelled. In his hair, on his skin. Clay, not brine.
The engine in Addison’s chest drove pistons through his limbs. At Wallace’s urging, he had peered through the sleeping porch’s screen in the night and seen the twins’ pale heads on pillows. He’d nodded with a furrowed brow the way people did when shown a prized object that was meant to be admired but only baffled.
He crept to a different window. Marian was sitting bareback on the gray horse in her pajamas, holding the reins as Jamie climbed the paddock fence and slid on behind her, bare feet dangling. They turned toward the creek and were gone, the horse’s haunches disappearing among the trees, the dogs trotting after.
Addison had never quite known whether he should believe the twins were his but had not been willing to insult Annabel in such a way. Now he believed. He could see it in their arms and legs, the shape of their feet, and in some less tangible way, too—the way the morning air arranged itself around them. He believed, also, resolutely, that he had nothing to offer them. He would never know what to say to them or how to be fatherly and warm. He could only disappoint and wound.
All was quiet outside. He washed at the basin before he slipped out and strode quickly down the road, back the way Wallace had driven him. Less than three dollars were left in his pocket, but he had more in the bank in New York. Not a fortune but enough for now.
Not long after the sun came up, he boarded a westbound train.
Los Angeles, 2014
One
If it weren’t for the thing with Jones Cohen, I wouldn’t have ended up playing Marian Graves. It’s not like I could have predicted that at the time, though. All I knew was I had that tight feeling in my chest, like I wanted to kick over someone’s sandcastle. As a kid, I’d had that feeling a lot. I’d be on set and want to go berserk and stomp the plastic stable with the plastic pony into plastic bits, but I never acted on it until I got older, not until I was Katie McGee and weaving down the 405 in the backseat of someone’s Range Rover at 110 miles per hour, not doing anything more than laughing and shrieking but still feeling like I was pulverizing something.
Anyway, I don’t know why I went home with Jones. At the time I would have said it was because I wanted to, but I didn’t, not really. I was bored and restless and pissed off, but none of that was new, none of that made me take Jones’s hand and walk out into the light. I was tired of the light, but of course all I did was bring more on myself.
I don’t remember everything. I remember sitting with Jones at the club, on a weird love seat cordoned off in its own little VIP alcove, a funereal, Victorian-looking thing with a tall black back that curved over us like a beetle’s wing. I remember the tattoo of Johnny Cash on his forearm and his leather cuffs and turquoise rings. Sources said we were cozy and flirty, that I was being seductive, that I was all over the notorious ladies’ man, but I don’t remember if I suggested we leave or if he did. I don’t remember exactly what I said to him, but I know I would have teased him, pressing for details about the famous women he’d slept with. I would have been earnest, then tough, then soft and vulnerable. I have a vague recollection of him telling me that his next album would be stripped-down as fuck, just him and his guitar. And I’d told him that sounded amazing and absolutely what you should be doing, which I sort of stand by because even though Jones’s persona is douchey, he is a legitimately great guitarist. The floor was slick, and I remember slipping on our way out, one precarious shoe glissing sideways under me as we passed the shadowy coat-check guy tending his hoard of unnecessary L.A. coats in his red-lit cave. That might have been when I took Jones’s hand. The hostess told us to enjoy our evening—pretty girl, hungry, giving me the usurper’s eye—and the door opened, and the night exploded.
Even drunk, with everything looming and pivoting around me, I knew they would be waiting, my rookery in their black leather and their stupid Kangol hats, shit-talking and smoking while they waited, vigilant, their motorcycles and Vespas stacked around the block. The door opened, and their cameras went up like long black snouts. Shutters chattered; the flashes crowded in. They pressed closer until I almost choked on the light. Jones’s guys elbowed them back, making a tunnel for us to the car. Hadley! Jones! Hadley! Are you together? Hadley, where’s Oliver? Did you split up? In the pictures, my dress is too short. I am bleary, half smiling, sly, clinging to Jones’s hand. At least I kept my legs together getting in the car.
They followed us to Jones’s house in a celebratory swarm, flying along, popping white light against my window even though it was tinted the glossy, opaque black of Japanese enamel. In the car I remember Jones working my earring free with his tongue, pushing the hook through my lobe until the flimsy tangle of diamonds was hanging from his smile—a party trick, like tying a cherry stem into a knot. I remember his cavernous house with the usual huge abstract canvases and everything else white as heaven in a joke about heaven. I remember a tattoo high on his inner thigh that said, in tiny, earnest capitals, LOVE ME.
Oliver was married when I met him, when we were testing for the first Archangel movie. He was twenty and his wife was forty-two, a theater director from London who strode around in studded boots and asymmetrical jackets by avant-garde Japanese designers, as noble as a Roman senator. He didn’t leave her for me. He didn’t leave her at all. According to Oliver, after their second anniversary she announced that her passion for him had burst like an overfull balloon, destroying itself.
I didn’t know about light, not really, until Oliver and I first held hands in public. It was at the premiere for the second film. We’d been secretly sleeping together for three months, but we were sick of all the spy craft and rumor-quashing. He got out of the car first, and the thousands of crazy bitches behind the barriers screamed like they were being burned alive. When he reached back and pulled me out and didn’t let go of my hand, the noise and the light seared me. I thought I would be vaporized, nothing left except my shadow burned onto the red carpet. In the pictures, I’m glaring like a war criminal facing a tribunal. Oliver smiles, waves. Light is the medium of his beauty. In person, he is excessively handsome, obviously, but on film he transfixes. Between the projector and the screen he is changed into something almost unbearable to look at.
The sound and the light on the red carpet wasn’t for us, though, not really. By getting together, we were making the story seem real, and the crazy bitches wanted the story to be real so badly they lost themselves. An especially radicalized splinter sect were the ones who wrote the hard-core erotic fan fiction. They tunneled through the internet, digging a labyrinth where they could pile up their desires and nurse them like larvae.
They were ruining it for themselves, and they didn’t even know. They didn’t realize they wouldn’t like the books if the story gave them exactly what they wanted. People like stories that leave them a little frustrated, that have an itch. The bitches wanted Archangel to be tailored to all their most secret kinks, but they wanted it to be inviolate, too. Whenever we changed any tiny thing in the movies, they got in touch. Lizveth’s house is sky blue, not blue-green, you morons. Or, Gabriel is wearing an Arctibear hat when he and Katerina kiss for the first time, which should be WHITE not GRAY, which you should KNOW because it SAYS in the BOOK.
Not that Oliver and I didn’t get greedy, too. The characters lingered in us. We thought we could ride all the longing and passion we’d been acting like an updraft. We felt magnanimous when we got together,
like we were fulfilling an obligation to the story. But the crazy bitches wrote about us, too. Us, the people, Hadley Baxter and Oliver Trappman, the actors in L.A., not Katerina and Gabriel, the figments of Gwendolyn’s imagination who live in the nonexistent empire of Archangel.
Oliver and I once read some fan fiction about ourselves, just to see. At first we laughed at the typos, and then we got quiet, me sitting on his lap while we read a clammy-palmed fantasy about us fucking for the first time. “I only want you,” Oliver said to me in that story, like Gabriel says to Katerina a thousand times. “Forever.” But then, in a move that would have scandalized dear polite Gabriel, fan-fiction Oliver pulled up my “expensive couture designer gown” and got me with his “throbbing cock.” Give it to me, moaned Hadley. Oh ya. You are such a hot and famous movie star and I live you so so much.
Oliver closed the computer. Out the window, a hummingbird appeared, attracted by the morning glory that grew on that wall of my house. It hovered and looked in at us quizzically, its iridescent chest hanging still in space, its wings nearly invisible with speed. We were sitting at a busy intersection of realities. We could feel the celestial wind.
“I live you so much,” we started saying to each other.
We is safer than I when you’re inside it, but it’s a tippy thing, unreliable, ready at any moment to toss you away and leave you exposed as an I after all. Once you are a we, you are also a them, a target to be spotted and photographed. A prize. A quarry, by which I mean something to be stalked and also a pit mine. We were spotted and photographed together in New York, Paris, Saint Petersburg, Cabo, Kauai, on a yacht off Ibiza, partying après-ski in Gstaad, at the grocery store, at the gas station, hungover at Umami Burger. They mined us for stories, tidbits, truths and lies, lies and truths, fashion tips, fitness tips, diet tips, hair tips, relationship tips, c’mon, baby, just the tips. They rated our outfits, scored our beach bodies, announced I was pregnant with twins, announced, sorry, correction, I wanted to be pregnant with twins, announced I was going to rehab, announced we were engaged, announced our engagement was off. They wanted to know what was in my purse, in my closet, on my list of beauty must-haves. They scraped away at us, made us into something ransacked and empty.
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