“A young woman and someone who could be her father,” he said. “I saw who I really was, and that was someone I didn’t want to be.”
* * *
When I got home, Kelsey was floating on a giant inflatable swan in the pool, wearing round pink sunglasses and a straw hat as big as an umbrella.
“How was it?” she called excitedly.
“Great,” I said, but kept on walking. I knew she was dying to hear all about my meeting with Hugo and what I’d decided about making him a character in the show.
But I hadn’t decided. And I couldn’t decide until I’d talked to Josh.
I retreated into the guesthouse and firmly shut the door behind me. The sprawling, low, built-in bed, which looked like something Warren Beatty might have cavorted on in the seventies, was the only place to sit, so I propped myself up against a wall of pillows and FaceTimed Josh. He answered right away, an uncertain smile on his face, as if he was happy to hear from me, but was afraid I was calling with bad news.
“I’m sorry I didn’t let you know I was leaving,” I said.
He exhaled, relieved that I hadn’t said, I hate you and I never want to see you again. Behind him, through one of his office’s enormous arched windows, the sun was setting over the harbor.
“No worries,” he said. “Frankie filled me in.”
“About the TV version of Younger?”
“Yeah, I heard. That’s really exciting.”
“I’m glad you think so.” I took a breath. “There are changes some people want to make in the show.”
“Changes?” he said, on alert again. “What kind of changes?”
“The star who’s playing the lead—you know, me—wants us to hire her old boyfriend to play, well, her old boyfriend. Old as in aged. She thinks if she’s in the show with a younger actor that he’s going to look better than her.”
Hugo had explained this to me at lunch. Stella wanted to avoid the Beauty and the Beast experience on national television.
“So Josh is going to be… old?” young Josh, real Josh said.
That was an idea. But probably not the right one.
“No, the guy is probably going to be a whole different character,” I said.
“So what happens to Josh?” he said. “I mean, TV Josh.”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “I’m afraid there might not be a Josh.” I couldn’t help wincing. “I’m sorry.”
Josh laughed. “That’s okay. I’m actually relieved. Ever since Frankie told me about the show, I’ve been thinking it would be weird seeing a character with my name looking and acting like me on TV. But I didn’t want to screw things up for you.”
“So you’d rather there weren’t a Josh in the show?” I said.
“I guess that’s what I’m saying.”
That should have been good news, but instead it stung.
“I was actually hoping to keep Josh in the show,” I said. “Alice’s relationship with Josh is what the whole story is about.”
“Not the whole story,” said Josh. “It’s only part of the story. It’s also about her at work, and with her friends and daughter.”
I hesitated. I couldn’t decide if he was downplaying his role to reassure me that he was okay with being dumped from the show, or if he really underestimated how important he’d been to me.
“Josh, it was you who made me see myself as younger, who made me believe in myself as younger,” I said. “That transformation was more about how you made me feel inside, what you made me believe I could do, than it was about how I looked.”
“I do see you like that,” he said.
“But I’m not that person,” I said. “I wasn’t then, and I’m really not now. And you seeing me like that… It felt so good. It feels so good. But it’s also a problem.”
“You were right that I shouldn’t have come on to you when I’m still with Zen.”
“That’s not the problem I’m talking about,” I told him. “I’m talking about how I was using you. I wanted you to be attracted to me so I could feel young again.”
“I am attracted to you,” he said. “It’s not about how old you look.”
“It’s about how old I am,” I said. “I’ve always said that age didn’t matter when it came to us, but I see now that it did matter. It was everything.”
I’d loved Josh back then, I understood now, not despite his youth but because of it, because of how it made me feel—like I was young too. He’d made me feel like someone who I wasn’t, like the pretense was real, and I wanted him to make me feel like that again. But it was time for me to let go of the fiction and live as my real self. Perhaps rewriting my story would help me rewrite my life.
* * *
It was nearly sunset, the first time since early morning that it was bearable in the hot sun to hike in Griffith Park. Though the trailheads started at the end of the neighborhood right up the hill from Kelsey’s house, we drove to get there, Theo perched obediently in the backseat of Kelsey’s robin’s-egg blue Mini.
Hiking in the park was Kelsey’s favorite thing to do in LA, and it was rapidly turning into mine too. It seemed so crazy to a New Yorker that not only was there a massive wild and wooded park a couple of miles from Hollywood and Vine, but that serious hiking up its switch-backing trails was the favorite avocation of many Angelenos. You saw everyone in the park, from impossibly buff actors running straight uphill to octogenarians walking their dogs to groups of Japanese tourists and multigenerational families making a day of it. While there were a few roads that let you drive through the park, there were too many trails to count: wide as a boulevard and narrow as a catwalk, paved and dirt, steep and flat. They crisscrossed each other so that there were dozens of ways to get anywhere—the Observatory was the prime destination—or nowhere at all. Kelsey seemed to know every one of them, so I blindly followed wherever she led. She said she did her best thinking here, which made a hike in the park the perfect venue for us to wrestle with Hugo’s potential character in Younger.
“I’m ready to let go of the story of the older woman falling in love with the younger guy,” I told Kelsey.
She smiled but raised her eyebrows at me. “Hugo must have really sold you on the idea of the old boyfriend.”
“Not at all,” I said. “He just made me see the story differently.”
“What do you mean?”
The trail had segued from a quiet leafy street as sedate and suburban-looking as Homewood, up a gently sloping paved road bordered by a lush golf course on one side and the mountain on the other. Now we turned off the road and onto a generous path, which quickly became steeper as it wound toward the top of the mountain.
“You were right,” I told Kelsey, beginning to huff a bit. “It doesn’t need to be the story of my life. It can be any story I want it to be. The man can be any man I want him to be.”
“So who do you want him to be?” Kelsey asked.
That was the challenge. Josh the character had been easy because he was based on Josh the man. Hugo the character—or rather, the character Hugo would play—could be anybody.
“We know he works at the publishing company,” I said. “That part makes sense.”
“It lets us tell work stories and personal stories at the same time,” said Kelsey.
We rounded the first big curve, the one that showed us how far we had to go till the top.
“I’m not sure I love him being her boss,” I admitted. “I mean, if I was supposed to be a twenty-six-year-old assistant, I wouldn’t date the fifty-year-old owner of the company.”
“Yeah, it’s definitely kind of creepy in the age of Me Too,” Kelsey agreed.
“So he can’t be coming on to her while she’s resisting,” I said.
“And she can’t be coming on to him, either,” said Kelsey.
“They’ve got to do a lot of yearning,” I said. “And brooding. If he’s going to be her boss and you don’t want it to get creepy, they can’t do anything besides brood for a long time.”
; “Like Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester,” said Kelsey.
“Or Sam and Diane, or Jim and Pam,” I pointed out, proud I’d been able to come up with TV references. “She definitely hates him.”
“I thought she was supposed to love him!” Kelsey said.
“A long period of hate,” I said. “And then at the end of the final season, one last intense act filled with love.”
“Why does she hate him?”
“She sees him as… a playboy,” I said. I was totally improvising. “He’s a rich dilettante. Fifty-something years old, never married, has always dated younger women…”
“That sounds like Hugo Fielding,” Kelsey said.
“Exactly.”
We’d climbed high enough by that point to have a panoramic view of the downtown skyline. I still hadn’t been to downtown LA, or anywhere else that looked like a city in the East Coast sense of the word. But from here, at least, we saw tall buildings close together, shining gold in the reflection of the setting sun. We gazed at the vista as we caught our breath, though I don’t think either of us was seeing the view so much as the imaginary people in our heads.
“But he’s not Hugo Fielding,” Kelsey said. “He can be anyone we want him to be. Anyone who best serves Alice’s story.”
“I’m not sure how to decide that,” I said.
“Let’s start with figuring out his name,” Kelsey said.
“James,” I said.
That name felt right, always a good sign. It was like the spirit of the character announcing himself.
“You mean like… James Bond?” Kelsey said.
“Shit.” Though I’d only come up with it a minute ago, I was already attached to the name James.
“I seem to remember Stella saying Hugo was trying to distance himself from that character,” Kelsey said.
“Yeah, but fuck it,” I said. “He gave me creative control over his character, so let’s see if he really means it.”
“All right,” said Kelsey. “Maybe James is Mrs. Whitney’s grandson.”
I actually smacked her for that one.
“If Mrs. Whitney was his grandmother,” I pointed out, “she’d be ninety years old and she’d be really pissed at you.”
“Well, she can’t be his mother, because then he seems like a mama’s boy.”
“What if she was his rich maiden aunt or something?” I said.
“Yeah,” Kelsey said, growing excited. “Maybe she leaves him the publishing company after she…”
“Runs off to Costa Rica with a surfer dude.”
“I love it.” Kelsey laughed. “In the pilot, Alice could get hired by Mrs. Whitney, who immediately turns around and goes to Costa Rica, leaving the company in the hands of her hot nephew, James.”
“James is a Brit,” I said.
“He’s not Hugo, remember,” Kelsey said. “Or 007.”
“Yeah, but if he’s a Brit, he can have a life he left behind in London.”
“Life meaning wife?” Kelsey said, raising her eyebrows.
“Not a wife,” I said. I flashed on Zen. “Or a fiancée. Maybe an ex-wife.”
“That’s good,” said Kelsey. “So he’s not the aging playboy Alice first takes him for.”
“He’s got kids,” I said, imagining how nice it would be—for my character, I mean—to be with a man who wasn’t looking to start a family. “But they’re grown up and back in England with the ex.”
“So he and Alice are actually kind of on the same level, although they’re not aware of it,” said Kelsey. “They’re both divorced, they both have kids, they’re both lonely…”
“They can’t be too lonely.” I laughed. “No one is going to believe that Stella Power and Hugo Fielding are spending years alone in New York not dating anyone.”
“You’re right,” Kelsey said. “There are others. But no one is really right.”
“Because Alice and James are perfect for each other,” I said.
We were at the top of the trail now, where it broadened out and sloped gently to the lip of the canyon. People sat there playing with their dogs, watching the sun set. I heard the sound of a flute trilling up and down the scales, like a celebratory soundtrack to the vision Kelsey and I had created. And maybe to our friendship being back on track.
We started downhill, taking the narrow path. Theo was in the lead.
“I love the setup,” said Kelsey. “But who is James? How do you see him?”
“He’s thoughtful,” I said. “Kind.”
“Sexy,” said Kelsey.
“Do you think so?” I asked.
“Every woman in the world thinks so,” said Kelsey.
“Would you date him?” I asked her. “I mean in real life.”
“No, because he’s an actor and we’re working together, remember?” Kelsey said. “And even if those things weren’t true, I doubt he’d be up for having a baby.”
“I think that’s true,” I agreed.
“The question isn’t would you date him, but who would you date?” Kelsey said. “That’s who James should be.”
“I don’t want to date anybody.”
“Yeah,” Kelsey said. “But if you were a sane, untraumatized person who was ready to move on from her old life and start a new one, who would you fall in love with?”
“I’m not traumatized,” I said, insulted.
“You spent the last two years living on a rock,” said Kelsey.
“All right, so you’re asking me to describe the man I would marry if someone held a gun to my head?” I said.
“I would not put it like that, but okay.”
I had imagined such a man, hadn’t I? I mean, when I’d imagined any man beyond Josh. Someone like Paul Rudd only manlier, like Mark Ruffalo only taller, like Liam Neeson only younger, like James Gandolfini only more alive.
“Okay,” I said. “He’s close enough to my age that we like the same music, but bigger than me so we can’t wear each other’s clothes. Hairy, though not necessarily on his head. I’d rather be with a bald chubby guy than with somebody who wants to drag me out on a fucking run every morning.”
“What if he likes to hike?” said Kelsey.
“Hiking is acceptable,” I said. “I want somebody who’s not going to get insulted if sometimes I sleep in the other room. Someone who knows what to buy me for my birthday. A good kisser. Independent. But warm. Can beat me at Words with Friends but is okay if I beat him.” I thought a minute. “A good kisser. Did I already say that?”
It was turning seriously dark. If I had been by myself, I would have been scared. But Kelsey was confident on these trails, and I was confident that Theo would protect us, or at least that he would protect Kelsey, and maybe I could wedge my body in there so he’d have no choice but to protect me by association.
There was a howl, then another. At the bottom of the hill, back on the road that ran along the golf course, there they were, a whole family of coyotes, arrayed on one of the greens. Kelsey quickly moved to clip Theo’s leash to his collar, and just in time: The dog growled and strained against his leash toward the coyotes. The coyotes stood their ground and glared at us, eyes flashing as if they were the undead. They seemed to be reminding us that even though we were in one of the world’s biggest cities, it contained many elements beyond our control, untamed.
Kelsey and I turned away and walked briskly, not talking, toward the well-populated street where we’d left the car.
When we were back in civilization and again breathing normally, Kelsey said, “Now that you’ve described your perfect man, you’ll probably meet him in real life.”
“I wasn’t describing my perfect man so I could conjure him into being,” I told her. “I thought we were creating a character.”
“We are,” said Kelsey. “But if you put that character out there, the universe will send him to you.”
“That sounds like the kind of thing people believe in California,” I teased.
“You’ll see,” said Kelsey. “The universe has been
notified.”
eleven
I was so excited that I was in LA for the opening of Maggie’s art show at Hauser & Wirth, the most prestigious gallery in town. I wanted to support her debut in the West Coast art scene and I also wanted to show her a little bit of my new world. Given her children and marriage and white-hot career, I rarely got to spend five minutes alone with Maggie, never mind a whole evening.
I arrived at the gallery three hours before the party started, at the same time Maggie did, hoping to get a little time alone with her before everyone descended. But I was already too late. The gallery directors were there, of course, along with the art installers and the art critic for the LA Times. Then there was a photographer and a videographer, and then the caterers arrived.
So I wandered around, pretending to look at Maggie’s egg sculptures, which I knew literally inside out. They were scattered across the cement floor of the huge industrial space, as if laid there by a chicken the size of Godzilla. Though I’d lived with the sculptures for years, they looked different in the California light, beaming down from the girded, skylit ceiling that was so high it might as well not have been there at all. They looked more alive, somehow, as if the intensity of the sunlight might prompt them to hatch.
There was something—or, you might say, someone—at the heart of each of Maggie’s eggs, too. Inside was concealed another sculpture, a figure Maggie had carved and painted in the likeness of one of her creative heroines: Agnès Varda, Eva Hesse, Nina Simone. She’d photograph the figurative sculpture, to document its existence, and then encase it in plaster or clay or papier-mâché, layering and building the material until it assumed the shape of an egg.
The idea was that the emotional and artistic power embodied by the hidden sculptures would somehow emanate through the material that encased them. It was the three-dimensional answer, Maggie always told the artsy interviewers, to Sally Mann’s photographs of the Civil War battlefields, ordinary meadows and woods whose vibration was somehow altered by the horror that had unfolded there. I interpreted this to mean that you could hide a truth inside a confection, and it would retain its power, something novelists did all the time.
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