Off-Camera Hollywood Ending

Chapter 1

When I got the news that Matthew Malone wished to make my acquaintance, I was rereading the script for Andy Warhol Never Gets Old in a bare-walled apartment the studio had rented for me.

Matthew, I was told, wanted to meet in the lobby of his hotel.

We’d all just moved to Pittsburgh, a city not known for its hotels, but Matthew had found the good one, of course.

So I took an Uber there, pounding Altoids the whole way, thinking about what I’d say to the one and only Matthew Malone, who was playing Warhol in the movie.

Matthew and I had exchanged phone calls and a couple of text messages, but my friends all wanted to know what he smelled like, how he walked, what kind of emotion his eyes held, whether or not he was a typical Pisces, and so on.

The first time we talked, a few months after my mother died, he called me and said, “I’m so excited to work with you on this,” and I said, “Me too,” and then he said, “I know you’ve been crossing through a hard time, and I’m sorry.

” What a phrase. Crossing through a hard time.

I was indeed crossing through a hard time.

In the first weeks after Mom died, I mostly felt relief that it was over. I felt like I was coming up for air after a long time underwater. But eventually, I learned that it was not, in fact, over. The dead are not in the past, not really, because you carry them around with you.

_____

When I got to the hotel, I walked into the lobby—absurd chandelier, abstract paintings with flashes of neon.

I scanned the room for Matthew, but didn’t see him.

I noticed instead a beautiful boy—slight, unstyled brown hair, impish green eyes—slumped into a semicircular couch.

He was writing in a Moleskine notebook. He looked—I don’t know how else to say it—like a movie star.

I am attractive in a way gossip blogs sometimes call interesting or surprising.

I have a slight overbite. My eyes are just a bit too far apart.

I have a face built for the screen: an expressive but not particularly symmetrical one.

This boy, though, in his fitted black jeans and his baby-blue button-down shirt, almost seemed to have a visible aura.

Plenty of people are attractive. Precious few are genuinely magnetic.

I wanted to buy stock in him immediately, even having never seen his acting.

I took a few steps toward him and managed to say, “You must be Kai.”

He looked up from his notebook. He was chewing gum, and he smiled shyless and broadly as he removed AirPods from his ears. “Juniper,” he said, as if we’d known each other for years. He stood, and offered me a hand. I shook. Stronger than I expected.

_____

Not long before, I’d gotten out of a relationship, except I hadn’t gotten out of it so much as I’d been cast out of it, like a fallen maiden cast out of the church’s good graces.

On the dude’s way out, he’d told me there’s a word to describe what I felt for him—that the word isn’t love or lust but limerence, a state of involuntary obsession.

I was twenty-two. He was thirty-six. He’d been the cinematographer on my last movie, which had sort of flopped, and now he was moving on to the next one.

After the movie did a paltry seven million dollars in its opening weekend, I had nothing lined up, so I enrolled in college and took a course in modernist literature and art. I kind of suspected my life as an actor could be over, but then along came Matthew Malone to save me.

_____

If there had been room in my life for new limerence, I might have started to feel it toward Kai in that hotel lobby, but I’d learned that true love cannot coexist with true ambition.

I was not looking to get laid on the set of Andy Warhol Never Gets Old.

I was looking to do my job well enough that I became undeniable, that I ceased to be, as the phrase turns, a former child star and became something else.

“Is that your character notebook?” I asked.

“This? Oh, yeah, no. This is just, like, a sketch pad, I guess. I just draw. You keep one?”

Always. Even when I played the daughter of the Guy Who Didn’t Do It on a network procedural, I found a way to make her worthy of a hundred pages of notes. The less serious your job, the more seriously you must take it. “Yeah,” I said.

“I read you’re like that,” he said. “Not quite method, but pretty hardcore, right?”

“I guess,” I said. Fucking hell he was handsome, especially standing now, back straight, plenty tall enough for me.

I just looked at him for a minute, let my eyes settle on his. “You’re very comfortable with eye contact,” he said.

“Part of the job,” I answered, my eyes still on him. At last he laughed a little and glanced away.

“I’m glad one of us is fearless,” he said. “I’m fucking terrified.”

“Of what?”

He listed the reasons, counting them out on his long, thin fingers.

“Fucking up my lines, not being able to forget about the camera, not being able to share a screen with Matthew Fucking Malone. I’m scared that I’ll look scared.

I only ever went on a movie set once before and that was as a PA. I got fired after one week.”

About these things, I was without fear. I’d been on sets since I was six. Most comfortable way for me to live, really. When I wasn’t shooting or promoting something, I didn’t know what time to wake up or how to meet people or what to eat. On set, all of those questions are answered for you.

“You’ll do great,” I said. “What were you drawing?”

“Um,” he said. “You, actually. Since he’s trying to fathom you and everything.

Jude, I mean.” He opened his notebook and showed me the loveliest little line drawing of me on the red carpet for the premiere of my last movie.

In his rendering, you could hardly see my face through my hair, and my dress cascaded down to my ankles.

“That’s so nice, Kai. Really. Also, that’s a really important picture.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah, I wore open-toed shoes to that premiere and someone put the pictures up on WikiFeet, so I have the great honor of a WikiFeet page all to myself.”

He laughed. “What the fuck is WikiFeet?”

I heard a voice just behind me say, “A website where foot and toe enthusiasts rate celebrity feet. I’m a 4.6.” It was Matthew, of course. “Out of five,” he added after a beat.

Skin pale. Hair black. All shadows and angles, his eyes furiously vital.

He looked more like Warhol than I expected, the thin face and pronounced cheekbones, like even before the shoot he was becoming his character.

He hugged me, then Kai. He held Kai by the shoulders for a moment, then turned to me, then back to Kai. “I used to be twenty-one,” he said.

He said it like being twenty-one was a debilitating illness you only sometimes survived, which had more or less been my experience.