6. Holden
SIX
Holden
IT DIDN’T HAPPEN ONE NIGHT
I mean, it’s not like golden rays of sunshine ever shot out of my ass before I had to start limiting my refined carb intake for bullshit on-camera reasons, but not being able to indulge in holiday food for three years in a row is enough to make any actor consider a career in voice-over work. Having to spend Thanksgiving in LA was bad enough, but being here the week before Christmas just feels like punishment.
I miss my family. The way my mum decorates the apartment. The crisp winter New York air. Even the bare trees and the dirty wet snow. For the past few days I’ve wanted to yell at the sun. I’ve wanted to tell every living and inanimate thing that makes noise to shut the fuck up. And I have wanted to spread butter and brown sugar over a warm waffle, layer vanilla ice cream over that, press another waffle on top, and eat it like a sandwich with one hand while flipping off my personal trainer with the other.
But I can’t. Because I’m in Los Angeles. That would all be acceptable behavior in Manhattan, but in this town everybody’s supposed to act happy all the time because you can go to the beach all year long. Like that’s a good thing. And I am well aware that I would be a lot less critical of everything if I’d met any girls I actually liked recently. This…this is new for me. After being alive for a quarter of a century, I’m finally longing for a deeper connection with the women I’m attracted to.
I want to know what love is. I want to understand the love of a gruff man from a working-class family who met a vivacious grad student from London and then convinced her and her wealthy family that he would start a construction company and be able to provide for her if she would just stay in New York with him. I want to know the quiet torment that moved Yeats to be the one man who loved the pilgrim soul in a beautiful woman and love the sorrows of her changing face. I need to comprehend the selfishness of lovers that Elizabeth Bowen explored in The Last September , how two lovers can be so intensely focused on each other when there’s turmoil all around them. Not that Rachel Balfour didn’t do a great job exploring it in the Riders series too. But I didn’t write an essay on that in college.
And as she so often does, that girl whose journal I found three years ago drifts through my mind like a beautiful woman on a passing train. Or her emails do, I should say. It was such a brief but significant connection. I have no idea who she is or what she looks like. And part of me never wants to know. I want her to remain a pleasant, unknowable mystery in that way that you can really only enjoy things without analyzing them. PiperThanFiction. Author of some questionable fanfic, some excellent tween-girl kissing-book recs, and an Animal Crossing joke that was so clever it freaked me out. If that girl isn’t totally adorable and wonderful, then I don’t want to know.
I want a girlfriend that my fourteen-year-old sister doesn’t hate for once.
And I don’t want any of this for bullshit actor reasons.
I need to know that there’s more to life than this—material wealth and career success and physical beauty.
Not finding love or a deeper connection isn’t exactly going to stop me from having sex with a woman I’m attracted to—I’m twenty-five, not two hundred and fifty—but the longing is there and it’s real. All the more so because I’m alone, surrounded by so many strangers, and it’s the holidays. I am not at home here.
That’s how my friend Justin was able to convince me to go to that agency party last night. He wasn’t wrong—I do need to get some. Turns out, I’m just not in the mood to have one more discussion about who should have been nominated for what this year or where to stay for Coachella next year. With anyone. No matter how shiny their hair is or how bendy they look. I left the party early and agreed to meet up with a few guys I know from NYU at a bar because it was on Sunset, on the way back to the hotel.
I saw a gorgeous girl getting into an Uber right in front of me when my driver pulled up to the curb. Long dark hair with bangs. Sexy boots. A body that would take me more than a minute to explore. The biggest, most beautiful smile I’ve seen in ages. She was gone before I could get my baseball cap on and get out of the car.
Still, it gave me a glimmer of hope. That jolt you get when you cross paths with someone who lights you up. Even if it’s in passing. Just knowing that someone is out there. Someone with the power to turn you on and remind you what it is to be a man, that there’s more to life than this.
But as soon as I got inside the club, I wanted to leave. It had an old-Hollywood-supper-club kind of vibe that was cool, but everyone there was like some generative AI program’s interpretation of an attractive person. They looked familiar because their features were a combination of five or ten famous beautiful people I’d seen before, and yet nothing about them felt real or familiar. But I did get a waft of that perfume. Whatever that scent was that lingered in the cab that time I found the journal—that was in the air. I did two laps around the club, trying to find the aromatic, sexy, wise goddess. But no one there had that vibe.
I left after fifteen minutes and went back to my hotel to order room service. Alone. I usually stay at my uncle’s house when I’m in LA—my mum’s brother owns a really cool house in the Hollywood Hills—but it’s being rented out as a location for some Sofia Coppola film. So I watched the end of It Happened One Night on TV, which is one of my mum’s favorite movies, then switched over to Law peace sign hand emoji So cool meeting you last night.
SHAY: They never did bring out any good protein options btw.
SHAY: My macro tracker was not impressed lol.
ME: Hey. Cool meeting you too.
SHAY: We should hang before you go back to NYC.
ME: Yeah, I’m pretty busy right up until I leave, but I’ll be back after Christmas for a couple of weeks.
SHAY: Yeah, I’m super busy too.
SHAY: I’ll be at Soho House for lunch at one if you want to meet me there. Are you a member?
ME: I’m not, no.
SHAY: I’ll put you on the list as my guest. I’ll be at a screening at the DGA tonight and then I have three holiday parties to go to after. You should come. I’ll let you know when I’m leaving for Soho House and we’ll go from there.
ME: Cool. Happy holidays if I don’t see you before I leave.
No response to that, so that’s good news.
Although I really want to work with Alex Vega. He seems like a cool guy. He gets great performances out of his actors, and I saw a lot of his work on and off Broadway when I was in high school. I’ve liked the scripts for every film he’s directed, and there’s a soulfulness to his work that speaks to me. The guy’s legit.
If bringing a pretty actress to one movie premiere is really all it takes to beat out all the other actors in my age group at the agency, then who am I to pass judgment so quickly? Shay has a long list of acting credits—a lot longer than mine—so she must have some kind of talent. She just isn’t good at making small talk at parties or in texts. Which is kind of charming when you think about it. Or maybe I make her nervous. Because I’m so talented and good-looking and way more intelligent than the guys she’s used to talking to.
Yeah, that’s it.
She’s probably just nervous because she likes me so much.
ME: But hopefully we’ll meet up at some point!
There.
Vague and noncommittal, with an exclamation point to indicate non-dickish availability under the right circumstances.
Might as well see where this goes.