10. Hell Is Other People （driving Around in All Their Cars） #3
I caught only a flash of William’s expression before he vanished. The woman was speaking to him quickly, animatedly, with her hands, and I registered with pitying clarity: He doesn’t like it. That need for attention, that energy of desperation, of expectation. He doesn’t like it at all.
“So,” Atticus said, turning to me with a genteel air as I tore my gaze from William de Witt. “I’m sure Emmanuelle’s told you about William’s latest project.”
“Not in so many words.” I could tell it was being dangled before me to guarantee my compliance, but that didn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t also real. Plenty of films were made to satisfy someone or other. Some of them weren’t even necessarily terrible.
“Mm, well, it’s a period piece,” Atticus said. “Based on Killian de Witt’s life and times.”
A Great Man biopic. My heart sank slightly as I recounted all the ones I’d seen—the kaleidoscope of forgettable women peering beguilingly from the shadows.
“I’d heard there was a part for me?” That time, I phrased it as a question to remain nonthreatening. A complete hypocrisy, really, given my opposition to playing exactly what I currently was, but that was life, I’d learned. An eternal, irrational compromise.
“Oh, of course.” Atticus looked excited, almost giddy. “You’re exactly right for Emmanuelle.”
“Emmanuelle?”
“Oh yes, the love of Killian’s life.” A disorienting thought, but he obviously wasn’t talking about the woman I worked for, who would have been Killian’s granddaughter.
Atticus must have seen the confusion on my face. “Yes, our lovely Emmanuelle’s namesake.”
Ah. “So, Killian’s … wife?”
“No, no. Killian and Emmanuelle had a sort of star-crossed love, you see. A very forbidden affair. Very passionate.” He sipped his drink, a pink concoction in a vintage coupe glass.
I realized I didn’t actually know what Atticus looked like sober.
“You’re the eternal temptress, forever haunting him. His albatross, one might say.”
“A bit out of fashion, no?” I offered it playfully, aware of the truth: that I would be playing an object. The audience would never get close enough to me to see my interior life, my flaws.
Well, there were worse things. At least it was the primary romantic role.
I could see the reviews now:… yet more Oscar bait, familiar celebration of a tortured man, but the true star turn is that of Anya Morris in the role of Emmanuelle …
a welcome dose of gravitas to an otherwise suffocating fixation on a billionaire’s personal plight …
Yes, I could make something of it. Not every role was as good as its actor—in skilled hands, it didn’t have to be.
“Don’t forget, our Emmanuelle will be at the helm,” Atticus added sagely, as if this would necessarily change things. I supposed it might, in theory. “She’ll make sure her namesake is honored well.”
I had yet to sort out the de Witt family tree—were William and Emmanuelle half-siblings, then? Step?—but I knew better than to probe with further questions. Like what was so forbidden about the relationship, an answer I doubted I would enjoy.
“William’s father was a very proud man,” Atticus said, orating like a Shakespearean senator.
“He purposely distanced himself from Killian’s legacy and tried to force William to do the same.
Killian’s first wife was a masterly manipulator,” Atticus added in a pitying way, and in my head, I imagined her being played by an older actress, perhaps someone twenty-plus years my senior, the role of the long-suffering wife.
“So she moved her son across the country and insisted on making it alone. Of course, lot of good that did them both,” Atticus said with a snort.
“She died of cancer soon after, and William’s father passed in his early fifties without so much as touching the money that had been left to him. William inherited it all.”
“And Emmanuelle? The namesake, I mean.” The sour note played in my head again. It was occurring to me in a comically belated way that I was twenty-two years old, with a face easily mistaken for younger. Somehow I doubted she and already-married Killian were equally matched.
Atticus hesitated. “Well—”
“Anya darling, thank god you’re here!” Emmanuelle was upon us then in waves, first the saccharine smell, then the wafting breeze of her caftan, this one seeded with tiny, glittering mirrors.
She was wet, as if she’d already been in the pool this evening.
Her lips looked different, or maybe it was her cheeks.
Her smile seemed broader, stretched to the edge of its restraints.
“You can’t imagine how thrilled I am to see you,” Emmanuelle said, taking a hefty glug of Atticus’s drink before clutching my arm. “It’s such a boys’ club around here.”
“You know,” I said, taking advantage of the moment before she turned flighty and/or maudlin, “we haven’t worked out an actual schedule. I don’t suppose HR is around here somewhere?” I teased.
“Emmanuelle, have you not paid the girl?” Atticus played theatrically at shock. He stumbled a little, rocked by a wave of presumptive intoxication.
“I know, I know, I’m so fucking terrible with these little details. Genesis will handle it.” Emmanuelle waved a hand, looking around as if she expected Genesis to materialize at her elbow. “Anyway, let’s not send you off to work tonight, Hodel’s just been! Julian’s probably out cold.”
She flapped a hand in apparent disinterest. I realized then that she was accustomed to the existence of Jude’s monster, and had been consciously aware of the trap she’d set for me from the start.
What kind of person was she really? I couldn’t decide what was worse—her indifference toward my safety or her apparent disregard for the man who spent his days caged inside this funhouse mirror of a house.
Either way, I felt a wild pinprick of something, a sudden reluctance to play along.
It was what I usually felt when someone was joking about how they couldn’t get the hang of these newfangled pronouns, or when they used the words “females” or “oriental.” But then again, Jude had already nearly killed me, so I couldn’t imagine why I’d gravitate to his side.
Perhaps it was a mark of my craft that I could hold two things in my head at once: Inside Julian de Witt was a monster capable of great harm, whose existence alone necessarily compromised mine.
But he was also unwell, held captive, and unmistakably depressed.
I felt sorry for him the way I felt sorry for Frankenstein’s monster.
Or maybe I was just dangerously irrational, and once again at great risk of imminent death.
The moment had passed for me to say anything.
“Come on, have a drink,” Emmanuelle said to me, tugging my arm toward the bar.
“Atticus, did you tell her we’ve started production on the Hollywood noir?
It’s going to be shot in black and white except for the moments of moral ambiguity,” she told me excitedly, and despite my very recent misgivings, I was excited, too, because it was the first time I was witnessing Emmanuelle in producer mode.
I’d begun to doubt she had it in her. “It’s a subversion of the classic genre, you see?
And the character of Killian won’t just be some horrid old man—”
“No offense taken,” Atticus joked at our heels.
“Not you, Atticus darling, you’re divine—anyway, we’re going to look directly at his faults, you see?
We’ll witness them in full color, as if only those are visible through a contemporary lens.
And you!” Emmanuelle poured herself champagne that overflowed, spilling over alongside her excitement.
“Have you eaten? Here, take this—” It was another smoothie, which I accepted.
At least I didn’t have to worry about my diet when there seemed to be no solid food around the villa at any time.
“You’ll be in color, too. A love that defies the standards of the time—it’s really a piece about time itself, about eras, about history—”
I was so caught up, sipping my smoothie and spilling it, licking it from my fingers, that I forgot entirely about Teddy.
Emmanuelle stood by my side, waving the bottle of champagne as she spoke, refilling my glass each time it emptied, introducing me (“Anya darling, meet my very best friend ______!”) to everyone she saw.
“I can’t tell you how grateful I am for you,” she said after another little coughing fit.
I hadn’t noticed, at first, that her eyes had filled with tears.
By that point she had already made us another batch of smoothies—later I would recall the numbness of my tongue, the vague presence of pineapple on my breath, viscous green stains on the sides of our mouths.
“You can’t imagine what it’s cost me to get to this moment.
How awful it’s been, how endless and lonely.
The way he keeps all of us in a fucking cage! ”
She stumbled over and hiccupped a little, brushing a delicate swipe of powder from her nose.
She’d almost taken me down as well, and I experienced the faintly warm, glowing sense that I had blinked and gotten drunk.
I was sweating profusely from every orifice, ash had floated onto our hair like flakes of snow, but none of that seemed to matter now.
There was a glory to it, a sort of victory.
A Hollywood party, my luck overflowing like good champagne!
Soon everyone would know my name, Anya Darling, either because Emmanuelle introduced me or because she, via bullying, had put my name in lights.
“The ritual this, the ritual that … Well, but that’s not important now.” When she straightened, she put both hands on my shoulders. “I have the house, and now I have you.”
She smiled sweetly and brushed my lips with her own. “I’ll have Genesis get you a real schedule,” she said, and ducked her head to cough. “We’ll make sure there’s no conflicts with the noir,” she added when she came up for air, “though it might be a while, you know, with the industry as it is—”