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by Pamela Redmond

  “Maybe take a half,” Hugo said.

  “We’ll take two,” I told the waiter, as if I were ordering from a pastry cart. I looked at Hugo. “In case.”

  Hugo and I found two vacant Moroccan poufs at the base of a palm tree, and he instructed me to eat half the mushroom, but some from both the cap and stem.

  “How long will it take to kick in?”

  “Maybe half an hour, forty-five minutes.”

  I took a bite. It tasted like thick expensive card stock, like a love letter that had been buried in a loamy forest and dug up by the light of a full moon.

  “Why aren’t you eating yours?” I asked him.

  “I want to make sure you’re okay.”

  I kept nibbling and masticating. I felt at once completely detached from Hugo, as if I were perched halfway up the palm tree gazing down at us, and at the same time as connected to him as if we’d been married for years.

  “Maggie didn’t want me to come here,” I told him.

  “Why not?”

  “She was nervous for me?” That felt true but didn’t feel like all of it. “And maybe hurt that I didn’t stay with her.” That still didn’t feel like all of it. “And maybe scared that something bad would happen to me.” Still not all. “And scared that if I had too much fun, I wouldn’t go back to New York.”

  “Don’t go back,” he said, leaning closer.

  My heart picked up speed and I felt a little woozy, but from the mushrooms or the closeness of Hugo, I wasn’t sure. I examined what was left of my mushroom. I’d eaten the half that Hugo had prescribed.

  “What happens if you don’t take enough?” I asked him.

  “You won’t get high,” said Hugo. “But better that than too much. You’ll know for next time.”

  There wasn’t going to be a next time. I stuffed the rest of the mushroom in my mouth before Hugo could stop me. I chewed really quickly and swallowed hard.

  He studied me for a long minute before he said, “That’s okay. I’ll be here.”

  “Maybe Maggie was right to be nervous,” I said, pulling the white shawl closer around my arms. “It is scary being here all alone.”

  And I felt scared all at once, not in my mind but in my belly, as if I knew for sure that there was an actual murderer right there in the fog.

  “You’re not here all alone,” Hugo said. “You’re here with me.”

  He leaned yet closer, but as he did, I caught sight of a shadowy figure darting across the lawn, just beyond where the lanterns ended and the night began. I shivered, hard.

  “I think I’m starting to feel something,” I said.

  I closed my eyes.

  “Open your eyes if it gets too intense,” Hugo counseled.

  But it was too late for that.

  If my life was a long smooth ride in a comfy car, the car had sailed through the bridge railings and crashed into the water. And now it was sinking through the black, black muck.

  I flailed about trying to locate the image of someone I loved, someone alive who could pull me from this nightmare. Caitlin—baby Caitlin, little girl Caitlin, teenage Caitlin, grown-up Caitlin—flashed golden through my mind, like the sun appearing from between storm clouds. But then just as quickly the image of Caitlin fuzzed at the edges and grew transparent, as if she were a character I’d admired in a book or a movie I’d seen long ago. Someone who had never really existed.

  “You have to tell me what’s real,” I said, groping in the darkness, not really sure who I was reaching for.

  Hugo laughed. “Ah, what is reality anyway?” he said airily.

  I grabbed the front of his shirt and shook. “Nooooooo!” I screamed.

  “Okay,” he said, patting me to calm me down. “You are real.”

  “Who am I?”

  I felt incompletely tethered to the earth, as if I were floating above the ground, held down by a few fraying threads. I could descend into the muck or float up into the ether, those were my only options.

  “You’re Liza Miller,” he said.

  He had a reassuring grip on my arms now.

  “Do I have any kids?” I asked him.

  “You have a daughter, Caitlin, right?” he said.

  “Caitlin is real?”

  “Reportedly.”

  “What???” I snapped.

  “Yes,” he said, catching himself. “Yes, Caitlin is real.”

  “And the baby,” I said. “Caitlin’s baby. Is it real?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, Caitlin is real. Her child is real. Kelsey is real. Stella is real. Maggie is real.”

  “Maggie is real?” That one sparked another wave of panic.

  “Yes, Maggie is real and you are real and I am real.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I’m Hugo Fielding, Liza,” he said in a voice as careful and patient as a nursery school teacher’s. “You know me.”

  “I don’t know you,” I said.

  “Open your eyes, Liza. You can control this.”

  “You’re lying to me,” I said.

  “I am not lying to you,” he said.

  He said it soberly, but there was a tone in his voice that sounded familiar. He didn’t sound like Hugo, I realized. He sounded like James, the character I’d invented for him, telling Alice he wasn’t interested in her. Lying.

  “I am not lying to you,” I repeated, mimicking his British accent. “You’re such a fucking phony.”

  I could hear myself. I knew what I was saying. I knew how horrible it was and was horrified that I was saying it, but I meant it. I wanted to say it. Just maybe not out loud.

  “I’m not a phony,” Hugo said in his actor-y voice. I could almost hear the director whispering: More sincere.

  “I’m not a phony,” I said, in the exact same tone and rhythm. “Can’t you fucking hear yourself?”

  “I am not a phony,” he said, in an exaggeratedly deep and steady voice that sounded like a guy in a pain reliever commercial. “What can I say to make you believe me?”

  I burst out laughing. “That voice I believe,” I said. “That voice I love.”

  Again, horrified. Love? Why did I have to use the word love?

  “I love your voice, too,” he said.

  But he said it in that amused-sounding voice that sounded fake to my tripping self, and I told him so.

  The next two hours passed pretty much like that, back and forth, me screaming and hallucinating and demanding and blurting outrageous things one minute, then asking Hugo if I could touch his ears the next. I mean, I kind of hated this version of myself, but it was a lot more fun being her than me.

  It was like I had some special strain of Tourette’s that made me say exactly the kind of things that would drive him away, even though my biggest fear was that he would leave. Like my husband had, like Josh had. But no, I reminded myself. I’d left them.

  After what might have been twenty minutes or five hours, Hugo was able to persuade me to open my eyes. I was surprised to find the world still there, intact.

  Hugo helped me to my feet and led me by the hand to two chaises by the edge of the pool. The musicians had disappeared, but there was music coming from speakers that must have been hidden in the eaves of the pool house: Sade or Erykah Badu, what Maggie always called fuck music. Each chaise held a thick, faux-fur afghan, the kind that only felt like the hair of dead animals, as if that were an ideal compromise. Under our individual pelts, we held hands and talked about our childhoods, his in small town Cornwall and mine outside New York.

  The mushrooms had largely worn off, but had left me feeling like a gentler, more trusting version of myself. Our conversation wound its way around topics large and small, silly and sweet and dark. I told him about the Saturdays I’d spent with my dad in New York watching the Dancing Chicken and eating at Wo Hop, the trip to England where I met my husband, my brother’s accidental death at eighteen—still, and I hope forever, the worst thing that had happened to me. He told me about his early days in London camping in a squat, hi
s first trip to the U.S. on a freighter, even the much-ballyhooed story of his breakup with Stella.

  “We were both really young, and she was sleeping with lots of other people too,” he said. “But I fell in love with someone else. Which made me the bad guy.”

  “Someone else, meaning Madonna,” I said.

  “Right.”

  “So what was she like?”

  “You’re not really asking me that,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  I thought it was a testament to how comfortable I’d grown with him that I could ask him that, rather than pretending I had no interest in the topic.

  “Because I’m not going to tell you anything really interesting,” he said. “You or anybody else. She was intense, she was ambitious, she was magnetic. What was Josh like?”

  “He was hot, he was beautiful, he was loving,” I said. I hated to say those things out loud, not because they weren’t true, but because they made me miss him. “And he was very young.”

  “So you two are not together anymore?”

  “No,” I said shortly. And then, because I wanted to change the subject as much as anything else, I said, “I’m sorry about tonight. I know I was horrible.”

  “It’s okay. It’s part of the experience.”

  “That was terrifying,” I said. “You were heroic.”

  “How are you now?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  I looked up at the sky. A vast network of stars shone through the scrim of fog, larger than normal stars and more brightly colored.

  “It’s like there are an infinite number of people and things and feelings out there,” I said, “and I can reach up and pick whichever ones I want.”

  “Which do you want?”

  He was looking at me as if he really expected an answer.

  “I’ll take a healthy family,” I said blithely, pretending to pick it like a delicate flower from the sky. “Good friends. My writing. Inspiration. Trust.”

  “No man,” he said. “Or woman, or… I mean, really, I’m judging from your book. I actually have no idea.”

  “Man,” I said. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Scared out of my fucking mind,” I said.

  “You said you didn’t trust me.”

  “But now I do,” I said.

  He smiled. “You do?”

  “Yes.”

  I let myself face him, let my eyes lock onto his. I felt like Ilse staring at Rick at the airport at the end of Casablanca. Kiss him, you fool.

  I leaned forward. He pulled back.

  “I would love to, believe me,” he said. “When you’re sober.”

  He permitted me to cuddle close to him, strictly for warmth. I dozed off with my head on his shoulder, and when I opened my eyes, the sky was starting to brighten.

  I remembered everything, good and bad.

  “I’m completely sober now,” I said.

  At this point I want it noted in the record that I could have fucked him right there on the chaise. And might have, if the patio lights had not blazed on.

  “Here you two are!”

  It was Stella, throwing open the glass doors at the back of the house, setting a thermos of coffee on the patio table. A few other revelers staggered out. Then some of the young people in white, seemingly as fresh in the gray dawn as they’d been last night, emerged bearing fruit and croissants and juice. I remembered what I’d screamed at Hugo at the beginning of the night: What’s real? I still wasn’t sure of the answer.

  thirteen

  I was jolted awake by a blast of bright sunlight when Kelsey pushed open the door of the guesthouse. I knew where I was: the white-painted beams of the ceiling, blackout shades, and cement floor of the guesthouse had come to feel like home to me. But Kelsey standing there was confusing. Though she was the owner of the guesthouse, and the main house where she lived was only thirty feet away, she had never come into this space before uninvited.

  “You’re alive,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You never texted me last night to let me know what you were doing. I was so worried about you.”

  “I went to Stella’s,” I said, biting back the information that I was with Hugo, and that I’d been high out of my mind on mushrooms. “I fell asleep there. I didn’t get home till it was light outside.”

  “You should have called me,” Kelsey said.

  I struggled to sit up. “You’re right,” I said.

  When I finally pulled my phone out of my bag in the car—a fleet of chauffeured Escalades waited outside Stella’s to transport guests home—it was dead. Not that it had occurred to me at that point to call or text Kelsey.

  “Maggie called this morning to check on you,” Kelsey said. “So I guess you didn’t go out with her after all.”

  “She went out with the art people.”

  “So was it a ’shroom fest?” Kelsey said. “As I predicted?”

  I could have lied to her. But she would find out the truth soon enough.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And you took them?”

  “I did.”

  “And?”

  “It was horrible,” I said.

  “How was it horrible?” she asked.

  “I thought I was under the ground with my dead ancestors.”

  “Jesus,” she said. “I told you not to do that. That stuff can be really dangerous.”

  “It was all right,” I said. “After the bad part, it turned really nice, and I got this incredible sense of trust and peace.”

  “Was somebody with you?”

  I hesitated. “Hugo.”

  Kelsey groaned. “Liza, I don’t know what’s going on with you,” she said. “You’re acting more like a teenager now than you did when you were supposed to be in your twenties.”

  I sat up straighter. “It was one night, Kelsey. I wanted to try it. It’s over.”

  “And you and Hugo?” she said. “Is that over too?”

  “I don’t know if there is a me and Hugo. But he really is a great person, Kelsey. I know you warned me about dating him, but I really like him.”

  “No!” Kelsey shouted. “I told you not to date an actor, and especially not to date an actor you’re supposed to be working with.”

  I understood how that could be problematic.

  “All right,” I said.

  “I am so furious at you,” she said.

  Maybe I had acted impulsively and irresponsibly. But I was an adult. No one had been hurt.

  “Okay,” I said. “But I don’t get why you’re so upset about this.”

  She thought for a long minute. “I’m afraid you’re going to screw up the show,” she admitted.

  “I’m not going to screw up the show,” I said.

  “You’re fighting with one star and you’re taking drugs with the other one. That’s not acceptable.”

  She was right. “I don’t want to screw up the show, Kelsey. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re going back to New York and publishing and writing when this is over,” she said. “This is my business. Whatever happens with this is going to stick to me forever.”

  I felt stricken. “I’m sorry. I really am. Tell me what you want me to do. If you want me to go back to New York, I’ll go.”

  “You tell me what you want to do. Decide, Liza,” she said. “If you want to stay here, I’ll be thrilled, but you have to pull it together and act like a professional.”

  “I hear you,” I said.

  “That means no starting fights about the plot, and going along with any changes they want to make.”

  I hesitated. “I thought everyone had signed off on the outline.”

  Kelsey and I, along with Hugo and Stella, had turned it in to the network last week.

  “They have,” she said.

  “So I thought that meant they weren’t going to ask for any more big changes.”

  “Everybody said they loved it,” she told me.

  “Okay, so now we just
write to the outline they saw and look for the principal actors, and then we’re done in LA, right?” I said.

  “That’s right,” she said.

  “Sounds like a week, maybe two?” I said.

  She said that should do it.

  I said that sounded fine.

  We agreed that I would write the first draft of the script, while she would work on casting. I think we were both looking for a way to keep working together without actually working together.

  I said I’d stay, she said she was glad, we gave each other a little hug. Then we retreated to our separate corners.

  * * *

  The experience with the mushrooms and its aftermath made me ready to leave LA in the way that Maggie’s lectures and Caitlin’s pregnancy could not. It wasn’t the scariness of the mushroom trip that made me want to go back; that had actually left me with a new appreciation for the beauty of everyday life. And it had given me a sense of trust in Hugo that I don’t think I’d ever felt with another man. He’d seen my worst and he hadn’t flinched.

  It was more that I’d ventured to the end of the plank in terms of LA experiences—gone as far as I was willing to go at the literal edge of the country—and the only thing to do now was turn back. There were many things that were wonderful about Los Angeles: the beaches, the canyons, the food, the houses, the weather so perfect it didn’t seem real. But I couldn’t imagine it ever feeling like home, and after yet another stop along the road, I wanted a home more than ever.

  I felt as if I’d ventured to the end of the plank with Hugo, too. I’d gone as far as it made any sense to go, and remaining in that Cathy-and-Heathcliff state of perennial wanting and not having was torture. Hugo and I exchanged some texts after the night of the mushrooms, but after reassuring him that I was fine, I told him I was working too hard on the script to get together.

  This was in fact true. I’d wake up at about seven, brew some coffee while I answered the morning’s emails from the East Coast, and then start writing. It was fun and easy writing the screenplay—a lot easier than writing a novel—now that Kelsey and I had broken every beat in the scene and the episode. All that white space! No phony descriptions or boring interior monologues!