Chapter 9
Sunday morning, I was deep into the Realm, still in my pajamas reading Gods of Andromeda, when I heard a knock at the door. I got up and glimpsed Kai through the peephole wearing a Pittsburgh Pirates hat and jersey. I opened the door.
His smile was bright as morning, his hands clasped behind him. “Wanna go to a baseball game?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“Great,” he said, “because I already got you a hat.” He revealed it from behind his back, and placed it on my head. “I gotta get dressed,” I said.
“You’re gonna close the door on me, aren’t—” he said as I closed the door on him.
_____
We had a couple hours to kill before the game started, so after getting dressed and brushing my teeth, I invited him in and struggled to shut up about Gods of Andromeda.
“It’s actually really interesting, because the Queen must have a daughter because sons aren’t very important, and there’s this wooden staff, and having the staff means you have the power, so every ruler wants to hold on to it, but of course to hold the staff is also to be aware that you won’t always have the power, you know?
Like, it’s almost as if you don’t contain the power; the staff does. The staff is yours only in trust.”
“Sounds like a banger,” he said.
“On the other hand, if I’m trying to be, like, The Kind of Girl Who Wins Awards, this is not a movie I take. This movie has a zero percent chance of winning awards. Maybe Best Kiss at the MTV Movie Awards, but that’s it.”
“It has kissing?”
“Oh, it has kissing. She has a husband but then she also has…what are mistresses called when they’re guys?”
“Misters,” he said without missing a beat.
“She also has misters. Including a hot foreign mister who is half orc. Orcs are bad but half orcs are okay from what I can gather.”
“So you’d get to hook up with a half orc if you got this part.”
“Yeah.”
“Sounds like a good deal.”
“If I could even get it. My agent says it’s a long shot.”
“Do you have a dad?” he asked.
“In the book? If so, he’s not mentioned.”
“No, in real life. I got bored talking about work.”
“Yeah, I have a dad. He’s career army. He and my mom split up when I was four. I don’t know him that well, but we’re friendly. He calls on my birthday. Comes to my premieres. All that stuff.”
“Do you blame your mom for the fact that you weren’t close with him growing up?”
“Jesus Christ, can’t we talk about the weather or something?”
“I’m just curious,” he said.
“I blame my mom for a lot of things. She is, in general, the reason I ended up like this.”
“Well, I like the way you ended up,” he said.
_____
The truth is, I feel like if I talk about my mom she will somehow reach out from beyond the grave and pull me into the afterlife with her, and that she’ll be waiting for me in heaven with a disappointed look on her face because I ruined her reputation.
I fear her. “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear,” C.
S. Lewis wrote, and for me the feelings intertwine.
Kai—sprawled across the beige microfiber couch in my apartment, looking up at the popcorn ceiling—asked if I thought about her during hard scenes, like the one on Friday. “I try not to give her that satisfaction,” I told him.
“Even though she’s dead,” he observed.
“She may be dead, but she’s still my mother.”
“And you don’t want to give her that satisfaction because?”
I didn’t feel like going into it further with him, so I just said what he already knew. “Because she stole my money.”
“You’re kind of a bad liar,” he said.
“I am doubly offended,” I shot back, kicking him from across the couch. “First off, I’m not lying, and second off, I’m a fucking phenomenal liar.”
He just shrugged. “Are you quite single?” he asked.
I’m sure my face revealed a measure of surprise even though I tried not to. “Quite. You?”
“I am always a little in love with someone, but yes, I’m quite single.”
“And who are you a little in love with these days?”
“You, I guess,” he said, with no concern. “But I’m a bit like Andy. I’m a bit fucked up when it comes to that stuff. Okay, we should go to the game.”
_____________
In the Uber on the way to the stadium, Jamie called. “Are you fucking Matthew Malone?”
“Am I what? Of course not.”
“Hmm,” she said. “Interesting. Well, Matthew Malone called the head of the studio and told him he’ll make some Christmas movie for him if you get cast as Agrippah in Gods of Andromeda.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“I am not.”
“He said he’d make a call for me; he didn’t say he’d make that call.”
“But you’re not fucking him.”
“No.”
“Pity. I was hoping you could tell me what it’s like. Anyway, you’re not working Thursday or Friday, so the studio wants to fly you out to audition.”
_____________
I have no particular love of baseball, but it was fun to watch Kai sketch the stadium and the field as he explained to me who each player was and why we should root for or against them.
We left after the seventh inning because the game was a blowout, and then walked along the Allegheny River for a while.
Kai had a funny way of walking—he was kind of like a heat-seeking missile.
I’d be walking in a straight line and he would draw toward me and then take a half step away and then get close to me again, until our hips were almost-but-not-quite touching, and then he’d take another half step away. I liked walking with him, though.
Something about the game had made him talk less, and I was enjoying the quiet, or at least what passed for quiet when you were in spitting distance of a highway. “You know a lot about baseball,” I said finally.
“Yeah, well, I played growing up.”
“Were you good?”
“I guess so. I was very good defensively. I was an okay hitter.”
“Like, you could’ve played in college?”
“I had some offers. Not Division I or anything. But yeah, I could’ve played in college. It’s just…there were a lot of other people who wanted it worse than I did.”
“So you were an athlete and a theater kid?”
“I contain multitudes,” he said.
“You were popular.”
“I guess.”
“And handsome.”
“If you say so.”
“And good at everything. Two parents, one brother…sounds like a pretty good life, Kai Laramie.”
“Sure does,” he said.
_____________
Monday morning, I was working alone with Matthew. In the scene, we walk through a Rothko show together, and Andy says, “I like Mark, but he’s so warm.” In between set-ups, Matthew and I sat on our cast chairs next to each other, and I thanked him for making that call about Gods of Andromeda.
“Who’s your agent?” he asked.
I told Matthew I was with Jamie at CAA, and inquired about him.
“I have a team more than a person,” he said. “Do you like her?”
“She’s an agent,” I said, and he laughed.
“They’re snakes, but they’re my snakes. The thing to remember, Juniper, is that they can always get another you. They can always find some starry-eyed kid who just got off the bus from Omaha. But you are your only you.”
“Yeah,” I said, with that thought—I am my only me—quivering through my body.
“You’re good,” he said.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Kai is good, too. Real good.” I tried not to take it personally that I got a good and Kai got a real good.
“He is,” I said. “Hey, can I take a selfie of us? The studio wants…content.”
“Gotta feed the beast,” he said, and immediately snapped into Warhol. His cheeks hollowed out; his eyes emptied. He offered up a faint wan smile as I snapped three selfies in quick succession.
“Reminds me of Andy’s Polaroids,” Matthew said. “He would’ve loved the Internet, Andy. It would’ve devoured him, and he would’ve loved it anyway.”
I uploaded all three pictures as a series. The people ate it up. Two thousand likes in fifteen minutes.
_____________
After work, Kai and I got dinner at a Middle Eastern restaurant a half-mile walk from our apartment building. We’d barely sat down when he brought up my mom again. “It was a complicated relationship, but I miss her,” I said.
“You continue to be a hilariously bad liar,” he said.
“Everything with you is a therapy session.”
“I’m interested in you,” he said. “I find you very interesting.”
_____
After dinner, we went back to his apartment to watch Kathryn’s first feature, Pro Patria Mori, about a guy coming home from a war and visiting the families of the three soldiers he knew who died.
Kai wanted to watch it to “see what Kathryn will make of us.” The movie was dreary—all gray skies—but suitably sad and well-acted.
It starred a guy I recognized but couldn’t name, one of those blank-canvas, white-guy actors who manages to be in everything without ever becoming properly famous.
Kai sat next to me on the couch, the same throw blanket over both of us, but we weren’t quite touching except at the shoulders.
My ex, the Cinematographer, kissed me the first time we were in a room alone together.
I thought about how the Cinematographer always wanted me, how even on set he would look at me with undisguised yearning.
But Kai sat awkwardly on the couch, his hands folded carefully in his lap lest he accidentally touch me.
It was like he was seeking another kind of intimacy.
I thought of something I’d read in one of Andy’s books: “Fantasy love is much better than reality love. Never doing it is very exciting.” And that wasn’t wrong.
I could feel the fabric of Kai’s shirt against my forearm, and just that nearly took my breath away.
I thought about kissing him—I had the feeling that ten thousand years could pass and he’d never initiate a kiss—but I didn’t want to ruin the feeling of his elbow almost against mine, our knees millimeters from touching.
_____
As the credits rolled at the end of Pro Patria Mori, Kai said, “Do you miss your mom? Even though she hurt you and everything?”
I sighed. He was relentless, and so I relented. “She wasn’t a bad person,” I said, pulling my knees up to my chest and wrapping my arms around myself. “Not exactly. But yes, I miss my mom. I wanted to make her proud. I probably still do.”
“I miss the person who hurt me the most, too,” Kai said.
“You don’t want to tell me about it?”
“I do, but it will change things, and I don’t want to change things.”
“Okay,” I said. He was quiet for a while and then I said, “The thing about my mom is she didn’t want to want what she wanted.
She didn’t want to drink. She didn’t want to…
I mean, I’d wake up and she’d be gone and I’d have to get myself to set.
My mother was always there—every audition, every callback, every day on set—and so when she wasn’t there, it was terrifying.
I remember when I was like twelve or thirteen, I’d have to call the producers and someone in transpo would come and pick me up and take my brother to school and everything.
“She’d show up a couple days later sweating whiskey, and she didn’t want that.
I would eat cereal for dinner or stuff I took from set and watch TV and worry that she wasn’t coming home at all.
I would take care of my brother. He was even littler.
I was so scared all the time. Of course she didn’t want that for us, but it still happened, you know? ”
He just nodded, inviting me to keep talking, so I did.
“And then when she was home, it wasn’t always better.
She’d get drunk and say terrible things to us—terrible.
She used to call me piggy whenever I’d eat, because she wanted to keep me skinny.
One time she was shitfaced and she said she didn’t love us, that she wanted to, but she couldn’t.
I wonder a lot if that was true. It couldn’t have been. But then, she did say it.
“She would make me take my pulse—this was when I was six or seven—and she taught me to count the heartbeats through my wrist for fifteen seconds and then multiply times four to know my heart rate. She would sit me down at the kitchen table and have me take my pulse and I would tell her, ‘A hundred,’ and she would say, ‘Get it down to eighty,’ and so I’d calm myself, tell myself I was at peace.
I’d act, you know? And I could do it. I could get my heart rate down to eighty.
And then she’d hit me, and ask me my heart rate, and I’d say one twenty or whatever and she’d say no, no, get it down to eighty, Juniper.
Keep it at eighty. Then she’d hit me again.
And eventually I learned to keep it at eighty even as she hit me.
She’s standing above me, and I’m seated at the kitchen table, and she’s hitting me, and I’m trying to keep my pulse at or under eighty. ”
I reached my right thumb to my left wrist and felt the life in me.
“Even now,” I said, “telling you about this, I can keep it right at eighty. I can take it lower if I want. Feel.” I reached my arm over to him, and his soft fingers pressed to my wrist. I kept my pulse low, then sped it up, then slowed it down again.
“Acting,” I told him. “Just like she taught me.
“She always loved my success, though. Loved it when I booked a gig. I used to think, Someday she’ll get sober.
Someday we’ll have a real relationship. She’ll ask for my forgiveness, and she’ll atone, and I’ll forgive her, and we’ll be able to have a real relationship.
But now that’s impossible, you know? Because she’s dead now.
You never realize how permanent death is until somebody you love dies.
” I only noticed then that Kai was still holding my wrist.