Chapter 7
Someone told me once that when your mother is dead, you are living both lives—your life and hers.
I lived my mother’s life even when she was alive.
We stayed each pilot season in an apartment building full of other child actors who were also there for pilot season, and whenever I booked a commercial or something, Mom would brag about me around the pool like she’d booked it.
Supposedly, I loved acting. But I was six. No six-year-old dreams of labor.
And yet. I missed her. I kept thinking about her, how excited she’d feel the first day on set.
I thought about how she’d leave a little early for lunch each day to make me a plate so I wouldn’t have to stand in line and could eat quickly and stay focused.
She’d been a constant with me until I had to kick her out the last season of Star Catcher.
Except for when she’d abandon us on her drinking binges, we were never apart. And then we were always apart.
Now, I was living her dream. She’d always professed a crush on Matthew Malone, and I was looking up at him, saying words that had been written for me by a properly good screenwriter.
I felt sick about having pissed off the studio with the Insta post, and so it was harder than usual to lock in to Carly, but after a couple takes of the wide shot I felt like I had a good rhythm.
Kathryn offered the kind of abstract notes I find a bit annoying—“Can we try it with more air,” or, “There was something very generous about that one that I loved”—and again she kept wanting me to play it young or innocent, which just wasn’t the Carly I imagined.
After we finished that shot, I was on my way back to the trailers when the producer Natalie came up to me and said, “Good first day so far?”
I didn’t want to live up to my reputation for being difficult. But I also didn’t want to make bad movies. “She’s having me be all doe-eyed and ignorant,” I said.
“Well, you’re, like, twenty-two in the movie.”
“I’m also twenty-two in real life, and that doesn’t make an idiot.”
“Sure,” Natalie said. “Right. Absolutely. I’ll have a word with her.”
_____
Matthew, meanwhile, was acting campy and overstated as Andy.
But there was no other way to be Andy. I mean, when Carly asks him about his affection for Basquiat, he says, “Jean-Michel painted me out. Everything we did together, he painted me out of it. It was wonderful.” How can you say those words without a bit of camp?
Kathryn kept trying to rein Matthew in. “Think Vertigo,” she told him.
“Imagine we’re swimming in a small pond, not the ocean.
” But when you’ve spent most of the last two decades embodying literal comic book characters, it’s hard to keep subtlety in your toolbox.
Still, Matthew seemed down to work hard, and I appreciated that he gave a reasonably good performance during the shots that were close up on me.
A lot of times big-name actors won’t stick around for your coverage at all, or else will read their lines in a monotone.
Matthew stayed, and kept being Andy, which made it a lot easier to be Carly.
Just before we wrapped on that first day, Kathryn found me and hugged me and said, “You’re our anchor.
I thought it would be Matthew, but it’s you.
” That felt nice, even if I was being treated like a wide-eyed ingenue instead of the smart and worldly girl I’d imagined.
_____________
When I made it to the makeup trailer after we wrapped for the day, I was surprised to find Ellen the Publicist waiting for me. “Juniper,” she said, “I’ve made a terrible mistake.”
“How’s that?”
“Your Instagram post got more likes in the one hour it was up than People magazine has received in the last seven hours. So we’re shifting.
Do whatever you want. Post costumes. Post conversations.
Post everything. You’re this movie’s number one media outlet.
I had no idea how engaged your following is. ”
“It’s the Nickelodeon thing,” I said. “This whole generation of kids who kinda grew up with me.”
“Well, post everything. That’s an order from the studio. You have total creative freedom.”
So I posted a series of photographs of my makeup being undone with the caption “Carly to Juniper: A Journey in Five Photos.” As they finished removing my makeup, I kept refreshing my Instagram page, watching the number of likes go up: 302 one minute, 487 the next, 1,645 the one after that.
I was getting ten or twenty followers every time I refreshed—just from a post in the makeup chair.
I do not want to want to be loved by strangers, but I do not want to want most of what I want.
_____________
Because I took longer in the makeup trailer than Kai, I ended up getting a ride home alone in a van driven by a guy named Tony.
I called Katie to check in and tell her about my Instagram disaster, which she of course minimized, saying that if anything the studio should thank me.
I got a text from Matthew then, to Kai and me: There’s a raw vegan restaurant…
in Pittsburgh? I’ll be there at seven. Hope to see U 2.
I replied immediately. I’d love to but I’ve gotta read for a project tonight. Another time!
I knew the Gods of Andromeda book would be waiting for me back at the apartment, and wanted to read it as soon as possible.
Ours was a small movie—a thirty-four-day shoot, only a $14,000,000 budget—but I had high hopes for it, because Kathryn’s previous movie had done well, and also because sometimes comic book actors like Matthew Malone get a role like this one and shock everyone with their talent.
I let myself fantasize that the movie might be big, that I might be big.
“Can you tell,” I asked Tony, “if the movie’s gonna be good? From the vibes on set or whatever?”
“No way,” Tony said. “Sometimes I think, man, people are gonna watch this film in fifty years, and it’s a total bomb.
I’ll be driving around Clooney and Pitt and everybody gets along like gangbusters and the movie comes out and nothing.
Other times, I remember once I worked this teen movie, about a Very Special Gal with Very Special Powers, and everybody was fighting all the time and nobody would share a van and the whole crew was walking on eggshells for two months and I thought this movie is gonna be an absolute shitfest, but then it was good.
Not just popular, but good. So I never know. Do you?”
“No, but I haven’t been around as long as you.”
“That’s for damn sure. I think it’s like baking a pie, only you don’t have a recipe and a hundred thirty people are making the pie and everyone’s blindfolded except the director. The movie business is a crapshoot, kid, so you gotta have fun with it.”
Kai called then. “You can’t just tell Matthew Fucking Malone you’re unavailable for dinner.”
“I have to read this book. Gods of Andromeda. The project could be huge for me.”
“It’s Matthew Malone,” Kai said. “Asking us to dinner. I can’t go alone. It will be awkward. I need you there.”
“I’ll ask Tony. Tony, should I be a responsible adult and go home and read for what I hope will be my next job, or should I go out to dinner with Matthew and Kai?”
“Go out to dinner, kid. This is a relationship business. You could do worse than having a relationship with Matthew. That guy got me hired. Worked with him ten years ago on a blockbuster and then he comes back to Pittsburgh for this and makes sure he hires me back. What a guy. Let him take you out to dinner.”
“Listen to Tony,” Kai said.
“Fine, fine.” I hung up and texted Matthew, telling him we’d meet him at seven. That left me with half an hour to get home and read.
I was ten pages into Gods of Andromeda—not a novel to be praised for its sentences but still immensely enjoyable in its world-building—when Kai knocked on my door.
He was wearing slacks, a tucked-in button-down, and a blazer with narrow lapels. I was wearing a sweatsuit.
“Christ, I didn’t know you had to dress up for Pittsburgh’s dining scene. Hold on.” I closed the door on him, threw on a dress, pulled my hair back, and put on some lip gloss and mascara, then opened the door again. “Ready.”
“You clean up nice,” he said.
“You look like you’re trying hard,” I said.
“I am,” he answered.
_____________
I don’t drink. Insofar as possible, and it’s not very possible, I like being in control of my life.
Also, having grown up with an alcoholic mother, I have a generally low opinion of the stuff.
From what I can tell, alcohol can make you love alcohol more than you love your friends or your children or your house or anything else, and I’d rather steer clear of Life Ruining Serum, even if it does have “floral notes” or “a hint of nutmeg on the finish.”
Which is what Kai and Matthew were saying about the white wine at Unheated, the raw food restaurant.
We’d been ushered into a private room across from the kitchen.
But even so, Matthew’s arrival could not go unnoticed.
The hostess’s eyes had widened slightly when he walked in, and she said, “Could I…I’m sure you get this all the time, but could I get a picture?
” Matthew said of course, and I took the phone from the girl’s shaking hands and took two horizontal and two vertical, and then she said, “Oh my God are you—are you Janie from Star Catcher?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Oh my God I used to love that show,” she said, and then Kai offered to take a picture, and I smiled.
When I was a little kid, my mom always criticized my smile.
She said it looked like I was in pain, or like I was baring my teeth in anger or fear.
But I didn’t know how else to bare my teeth.
I thought smiling was showing your teeth.
Now, of course, I know that it’s acting, that you must briefly connect yourself to the idea of joy so that your eyes and your cheeks and your body all smile together.
I thought about my mother’s memorial service, how I had to think of a happy memory with her, or at any rate with someone, to smile as each person came up to hug me and express condolences.
Everyone kept saying, “I’m sorry for your loss,” but I’d lost so much even before she died.
I’d lost the certainty that mothers are good, that love is simple, and with her death, I’d lost even the ability to hate her. Grief is a strange bedfellow.
In our private dining room, Matthew smiled and said, “One does tire of being an icon. But without them, who am I?”
“You sound like Warhol,” I said.
Matthew nodded, laughed a bit to himself, then took another long pull from his wineglass.
“How was your first day?” Kai asked.
“More fun than making a Marvel movie, that’s for sure,” he said as our waiter arrived with “carrot fries,” which seemed to be raw carrots cut into French fry shapes and sprinkled with salt.
“Most days with those, you’re just in a studio doing choreography.
How was your first day? It all must be new for you. ”
“I was terrified until the second or third take, and then I was…in it.”
“I love that your first scene in a movie was with me,” Matthew said. “I’ll never forget that, kid. Here’s to Kai.”
We all raised a glass—mine some kind of blackberry-infused kombucha—and cheered Kai. He was blushing. “I love you guys,” he said.
“Kai is quite profligate with his I love yous,” I said.
“Well, I love that,” Matthew said. He pressed his napkin to his mouth, put it back in his lap, and then said, “You know, when we were casting this movie, I said I want real kids, real young people, not thirty-year-olds playing young, because there’s an energy to these characters.
They’re both yearning—for acceptance, for love, for power.
And we found the perfect kids. Truly. I can tell from day one, you’re both—as Kai says—in it. ”
It was quiet for a moment when the waiter returned with some kind of cauliflower rice that had been soaked in brine. Matthew asked me what I was working on that I’d initially chosen over dinner.
“It’s this epic fantasy my agent likes,” I said. “Brian Arawas’s next project. It’s based on a book called Gods of Andromeda. So I’m reading the book now.”
“Same studio as Warhol, right?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s set in a world where all the leaders are young women. When you turn thirty, you age out of ruling. And the men are, like, courtiers.”
“Fascinating. I don’t know Brian well, but I know the head of the studio. You’d really like this film?”
“It would be huge for me. I’ve never been in anything with that kind of budget.”
“But do you like the project?” he asked.
“I really do,” I said. When Matthew spoke to you, you felt like you were the only person who existed. His eyes never left yours.
“It’s good of you to read the book,” he said. “I tried to read Warhol’s diaries, but they bored me. Even on audio. My attention span isn’t what it used to be. I prepped by watching interviews on YouTube mostly.”
“Juniper prepares,” Kai said. “Like, didn’t you read everything Warhol ever wrote?”
I shrugged.
“I’ll call Tom,” Matthew said out of nowhere. “Todd’s boss at the studio. I have an iron in the fire with him anyway. This Christmas movie with Brad.” He paused. “Pitt.”
“Right,” I said. “You call Brad Pitt ‘Brad.’ ”
“And you call me Matthew,” he said. “Everybody turns out just to be a person in the end.”