“I’m working on a comic-book project,” she tells him later, when he asks about her work. “Maybe a series of graphic novels. I don’t know what it is yet.”
“What made you choose that form?” He seems genuinely interested.
“I used to read a lot of comics when I was a kid. Did you ever read Calvin and Hobbes?” Arthur is watching her closely. He looks young, she thinks, for thirty-six. He looks only slightly older than he did when they met for lunch seven years ago.
“Sure,” Arthur says, “I loved Calvin and Hobbes. My best friend had a stack of the books when we were growing up.”
“Is your friend from the island? Maybe I knew him.”
“Her. Victoria. She picked up and moved to Tofino fifteen years ago. But you were telling me about Calvin and Hobbes.”
“Yes, right. Do you remember Spaceman Spiff?”
She loved those panels especially. Spiff’s flying saucer crossing alien skies, the little astronaut in his goggles under the saucer’s glass dome. Often it was funny, but also it was beautiful. She tells him about coming back to Delano Island for Christmas in her first year of art school, after a semester marked by failure and frustrating attempts at photography. She started thumbing through an old Calvin and Hobbes, and thought, this. These red-desert landscapes, these skies with two moons. She began thinking about the possibilities of the form, about spaceships and stars, alien planets, but a year passed before she invented the beautiful wreckage of Station Eleven. Arthur watches her across the table. Dinner goes very late.
“Are you still with Pablo?” he asks, when they’re out on the street. He’s hailing a cab. Certain things have been decided without either of them exactly talking about it.
“We’re breaking up. We’re not right for each other.” Saying it aloud makes it true. They are getting into a taxi, they’re kissing in the backseat, he’s steering her across the lobby of the hotel with his hand on her back, she is kissing him in the elevator, she is following him into a room.
Texts from Pablo at nine, ten, and eleven p.m.:
r u mad at me??
??
???
She replies to this—staying w a friend tonight, will be home in morning & then we can talk—which elicits
u know what dont bother coming home
And she feels a peculiar giddiness when she reads this fourth text. There are thoughts of freedom and imminent escape. I could throw away almost everything, she thinks, and begin all over again. Station Eleven will be my constant.
At six in the morning she takes a taxi home to Jarvis Street. “I want to see you tonight,” Arthur whispers when she kisses him. They have plans to meet in his room after work.
The apartment is dark and silent. There are dishes piled in the sink, a frying pan on the stove with bits of food stuck to it. The bedroom door is closed. She packs two suitcases—one for clothes, one for art supplies—and is gone in fifteen minutes. In the employee gym at Neptune Logistics she showers and changes into clothes slightly rumpled by the suitcase, meets her own gaze in the mirror while she’s putting on makeup. I repent nothing. A line remembered from the fog of the Internet. I am heartless, she thinks, but she knows even through her guilt that this isn’t true. She knows there are traps everywhere that can make her cry, she knows the way she dies a little every time someone asks her for change and she doesn’t give it to them means that she’s too soft for this world or perhaps just for this city, she feels so small here. There are tears in her eyes now. Miranda is a person with very few certainties, but one of them is that only the dishonorable leave when things get difficult.
“I don’t know,” Arthur says, at two in the morning. They are lying in his enormous bed at the Hotel Le Germain. He’s here in Toronto for three more weeks and then going back to Los Angeles. She wants to believe they’re lying in moonlight, but she knows the light through the window is probably mostly electric. “Can you call the pursuit of happiness dishonorable?”
“Surely sleeping with film stars when you live with someone else isn’t honorable, per se.”
He shifts slightly in the bed, uncomfortable with the term film star, and kisses the top of her head.
“I’m going to go back to the apartment in the morning to get a few more things,” she says sometime around four a.m., half-asleep. Thinking about a painting she left on her easel, a seahorse rising up from the bottom of the ocean. They’ve been talking about plans. Things have been solidifying rapidly.
“You don’t think he’ll do anything stupid, do you? Pablo?”
“No,” she says, “he won’t do anything except maybe yell.” She can’t keep her eyes open.
“You’re sure about that?”
He waits for an answer, but she’s fallen asleep. He kisses her forehead—she murmurs something, but doesn’t wake up—and lifts the duvet to cover her bare shoulders, turns off the television and then the light.
15
LATER THEY HAVE a house in the Hollywood Hills and a Pomeranian who shines like a little ghost when Miranda calls for her at night, a white smudge in the darkness at the end of the yard. There are photographers who follow Arthur and Miranda in the street, who keep Miranda forever anxious and on edge. Arthur’s name appears above the titles of his movies now. On the night of their third anniversary, his face is on billboards all over the continent.
Tonight they’re having a dinner party and Luli, their Pomeranian, is watching the proceedings from the sunroom, where she’s been exiled for begging table scraps. Every time Miranda glances up from the table, she sees Luli peering in through the glass French doors.
“Your dog looks like a marshmallow,” says Gary Heller, who is Arthur’s lawyer.
“She’s the cutest little thing,” Elizabeth Colton says. Her face is next to Arthur’s on the billboards, flashing a brilliant smile with very red lips, but offscreen she wears no lipstick and seems nervous and shy. She is beautiful in a way that makes people forget what they were going to say when they look at her. She is very soft-spoken. People are forever leaning in close to hear what she’s saying.
There are ten guests here tonight, an intimate evening to celebrate both the anniversary and the opening weekend figures. “Two birds with one stone,” Arthur said, but there’s something wrong with the evening, and Miranda is finding it increasingly difficult to hide her unease. Why would a three-year wedding anniversary celebration involve anyone other than the two people who are actually married to one another? Who are all these extraneous people at my table? She’s seated at the opposite end of the table from Arthur, and she somehow can’t quite manage to catch his eye. He’s talking to everyone except her. No one seems to have noticed that Miranda’s saying very little. “I wish you’d try a little harder,” Arthur has said to her once or twice, but she knows she’ll never belong here no matter how hard she tries. These are not her people. She is marooned on a strange planet. The best she can do is pretend to be unflappable when she isn’t.
Plates and bottles are being ferried to and from the table by a small army of caterers, who will leave their head shots and possibly a screenplay or two behind in the kitchen at the end of the night. Luli, on the wrong side of the glass, is staring at a strawberry that’s fallen off the top of Heller’s wife’s dessert. Miranda has a poor memory when she’s nervous, which is to say whenever she has to meet industry people or throw a dinner party or especially both, and she absolutely cannot remember Heller’s wife’s name although she’s heard it at least twice this evening.
“Oh, it was intense,” Heller’s wife is saying now, in response to something that Miranda didn’t hear. “We were out there for a week, just surfing every day. It was actually really spiritual.”
“The surfing?” the producer seated beside her asks.
“You wouldn’t think it, right? But just going out every day, just you and the waves and a private instructor, it was just a really focused experience. Do you surf?”
“I’d love to, but I’ve just been so busy with this w
hole school thing lately,” the producer says. “Actually, I guess you’d maybe call it an orphanage, it’s this little thing I set up in Haiti last year, but the point is education, not just housing these kids.…”
“I don’t know, I’m not attached to his project or anything.” Arthur is deep in conversation with an actor who played his brother in a film last year. “I’ve never met the guy, but I’ve heard through friends that he likes my work.”
“I’ve met him a few times,” the actor says.
Miranda tunes out the overlapping conversations to look at Luli, who’s looking at her through the glass. She’d like to take Luli outside, and stay in the backyard with her until all these people leave.
The dessert plates are cleared around midnight but no one’s close to leaving, a wine-drenched languor settling over the table. Arthur is deep in conversation with Heller. Heller’s nameless wife is gazing dreamily at the chandelier.
Clark Thompson is here, Arthur’s oldest friend and the only person at this table, aside from Miranda, who has no professional involvement in movies.
“I’m sorry,” a woman named Tesch is saying now, to Clark, “what exactly is it that you do?” Tesch seems to be someone who mistakes rudeness for intellectual rigor. She is about forty, and wears severe black-framed glasses that somehow remind Miranda of architects. Miranda met her for the first time this evening and she can’t remember what Tesch does, except that obviously she’s involved in some way with the industry, a film editor maybe? And also Miranda doesn’t understand Tesch’s name: is she Tesch something, or something Tesch? Or a one-namer, like Madonna? Are you allowed to have only one name if you’re not famous? Is it possible that Tesch is actually extremely famous and Miranda’s the only one at the table who doesn’t know this? Yes, that seems very possible. These are the things she frets about.
“What do I do? Nothing terribly glamorous, I’m afraid.” Clark is British, thin and very tall, elegant in his usual uniform of vintage suit and Converse sneakers, accessorized with pink socks. He brought them a gift tonight, a beautiful glass paperweight from a museum gift shop in Rome. “I have nothing to do with the film industry,” he says.
“Oh,” Heller’s wife says, “I think that’s marvelous.”
“It’s certainly exotic,” Tesch says, “but that doesn’t narrow the field much, does it?”
“Management consulting. Based out of New York, new client in Los Angeles. I specialize in the repair and maintenance of faulty executives.” Clark sips his wine.
“And what’s that in English?”
“The premise of the company by which I’m employed,” Clark says, “is that if one’s the employer of an executive who’s worthy in some ways but deeply flawed in others, it’s sometimes cheaper to fix the executive than to replace him. Or her.”
“He’s an organizational psychologist,” Arthur says, surfacing from conversation at the far end of the table. “I remember when he went back to England to get his PhD.”
“A PhD,” Tesch says. “How conventional. And you”—she’s turned to Miranda—“how’s your work going?”
“It’s going very well, thank you.” Miranda spends most of her time working on the Station Eleven project. She knows from the gossip blogs that people here see her as an eccentric, the actor’s wife who inks mysterious cartoons that no one’s ever laid eyes on—“My wife’s very private about her work,” Arthur says in interviews—and who doesn’t drive and likes to go for long walks in a town where nobody walks anywhere and who has no friends except a Pomeranian, although does anyone really know this last part? She hopes not. Her friendlessness is never mentioned in gossip blogs, which she appreciates. She hopes she isn’t as awkward to other people as she feels to herself. Elizabeth Colton is looking at her again in that golden way of hers. Elizabeth’s hair is always unbrushed and always looks gorgeous that way. Her eyes are very blue.
“It’s brilliant,” Arthur says. “I mean that. Someday she’ll show it to the world and we’ll all say we knew her when.”
“When will it be finished?”
“Soon,” Miranda says. It’s true, it won’t be so long now. She has felt for months that she’s nearing the end of something, even though the story has spun off in a dozen directions and feels most days like a mess of hanging threads. She tries to meet Arthur’s gaze, but he’s looking at Elizabeth.
“What do you plan to do with it once it’s done?” Tesch asks.
“I don’t know.”
“Surely you’ll try to publish it?”
“Miranda has complicated feelings on the topic,” Arthur says. Is it Miranda’s imagination, or is he going out of his way to avoid looking at her directly?
“Oh?” Tesch smiles and arches an eyebrow.
“It’s the work itself that’s important to me.” Miranda is aware of how pretentious this sounds, but is it still pretentious if it’s true? “Not whether I publish it or not.”
“I think that’s so great,” Elizabeth says. “It’s like, the point is that it exists in the world, right?”
“What’s the point of doing all that work,” Tesch asks, “if no one sees it?”
“It makes me happy. It’s peaceful, spending hours working on it. It doesn’t really matter to me if anyone else sees it.”
“Ah,” Tesch says. “Very admirable of you. You know, it reminds me of a documentary I saw last month, a little Czech film about an outsider artist who refused to show her work during her lifetime. She lived in Praha, and—”
“Oh,” Clark says, “I believe when you’re speaking English, you’re allowed to refer to it as Prague.”
Tesch appears to have lost the power of speech.
“It’s a beautiful city, isn’t it?” Elizabeth has the kind of smile that makes everyone around her smile too, unconsciously.
“Ah, you’ve been there?” Clark asks.
“I took a couple of art history classes at UCLA a few years back. I went to Prague at the end of the semester to see a few of the paintings I’d read about. There’s such a weight of history in that place, isn’t there? I wanted to move there.”
“For the history?”
“I grew up in the exurbs of Indianapolis,” Elizabeth says. “I live in a neighborhood where the oldest building is fifty or sixty years old. There’s something appealing about the thought of living in a place with some history to it, don’t you think?”
“So tonight,” Heller says, “if I’m not mistaken, is tonight the actual wedding anniversary?”
“It certainly is,” Arthur says, and glasses are raised. “Three years.” He’s smiling past Miranda’s left ear. She glances over her shoulder, and when she looks back he’s shifted his gaze somewhere else.
“How did you two meet?” Heller’s wife asks. The thing about Hollywood, Miranda realized early on, is that almost everyone is Thea, her former colleague at Neptune Logistics, which is to say that almost everyone has the right clothes, the right haircut, the right everything, while Miranda flails after them in the wrong outfit with her hair sticking up.
“Oh, it’s not the most exciting how-we-met story in the world, I’m afraid.” A slight strain in Arthur’s voice.
“I think how-we-met stories are always exciting,” Elizabeth says.
“You’re much more patient than I am,” Clark says.
“I don’t know if exciting is the word I’d use,” Heller’s wife says. “But there’s certainly a sweetness about them, about those stories I mean.”
“No, it’s just, if everything happens for a reason,” Elizabeth persists, “as personally, I believe that it does, then when I hear a story of how two people came together, it’s like a piece of the plan is being revealed.”
In the silence that follows this pronouncement, a caterer refills Miranda’s wine.
“We’re from the same island,” Miranda says.
“Oh, that island you told us about,” a woman from the studio says, to Arthur. “With the ferns!”
“So you’re from the same i
sland, and? And?” Heller now, looking at Arthur. Not everyone is listening. There are pools and eddies of conversation around the table. Heller’s tan is orange. There are rumors that he doesn’t sleep at night. On the other side of the glass doors, Luli shifts position to gain a better view of the dropped strawberry.
“Excuse me a moment,” Miranda says, “I’m just going to let the dog out. Arthur tells this story much better than I do.” She escapes into the sunroom, through a second set of French doors into the back lawn. Freedom! Outside, the quiet night. Luli brushes against her ankles and fades out into the darkness. The backyard isn’t large, their property terraced up the side of a hill, leaves crowding in around a small launchpad of lawn. The gardener came today in preparation for the dinner party, and the air carries notes of damp soil and freshly cut grass. She turns back toward the dining room, knowing that they can’t see her past their own overlapping reflections on the glass. She left both sets of doors open just slightly in order to hear the conversation, and now Arthur’s voice carries into the yard.
“So, you know, dinner goes well, and then the next night,” he says, “I’m in the Hotel Le Germain after twelve hours on set, in my room waiting for Miranda to come by so I can take her out to dinner again, second night in a row, just kind of semi-comatose in front of the television, there’s a knock at the door, and— Voilà! There she is again, but this time? One small difference.” He pauses for effect. She can see Luli again now, following a mysterious scent at the far end of the lawn. “This time, I’ll be damned if the girl hasn’t got her worldly belongings with her.”
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