Chapter 10
I had two days off because Kai and Matthew were filming scenes with the woman who played Warhol’s friend Pat Hackett.
My flight to LA for the audition wasn’t until four p.m., so I spent the morning at the Carnegie Museum of Art.
I don’t know much about contemporary art other than what I learned researching Andy, but I like art museums. I like the cafes.
I like watching couples look at art together.
I think what I like about museums is the same thing I like about acting: Acting is a chance to visit rooms in my mind that I have no other way of discovering.
I was standing in front of an abstract Joan Mitchell triptych painting, for example, and out of nowhere I remembered this Donald Hall essay where he writes that his uncle kept everything, including a box labeled “String too short to be saved.” Why did that painting make me think that thought?
I kept looking at the painting and I thought about our scene at the nightclub, how it both was and was not Kai who was crying.
I thought about kissing him, how one way or another—out of character or in it—I would kiss Kai soon enough.
I kept looking at the painting and I started seeing it in three dimensions.
I sat down on a hard white bench and heard the low hum of an air conditioner somewhere.
The three panels of the painting pulled me in.
Blue, orange, yellow, and green swaths of color with occasional bursts of red.
The painting didn’t look like anything in particular, really, but I felt like I could walk into it.
It seemed to me almost a landscape of the human interior, like the way it feels to remember that everyone you know is going to die.
_____
In the cafe, I wrote in my journal.
Who is the you aside from the list of things you are?
Abuse survivor, daughter, friend, ex-girlfriend.
Is there a you outside of all the identities, or are you a collection of them?
When conceiving Carly, you think about everything and everyone she went through, but isn’t there a separate self, an ineluctable you?
Do you know that part of her or are you just collecting her traumas?
Right then, I got a text from Kai.
I miss and love you but spending the day with Matthew Malone is fucking magic. He just told me, “A good life fits in your car. A great life fits on your motorcycle.”
I responded, He just says this shit like it’s nothing.
Him: He called me “a cool cat” earlier.
Me: You ARE a cool cat.
Him: Thank you. I have always wanted to be a cat.
Me: You being a cat person is maybe the least surprising thing about you.
Him: I just want to lie in the sun and be certain that I am loved. Where are you right now?
Me: I’m in the Carnegie Museum. Spent the morning looking at contemporary art, which I enjoy but do not really understand. Maybe I need to take a class in it or something.
I saw the three dots appear and then eventually disappear.
Time to go back to work, apparently. I walked through the nineteenth-century nature-y paintings of the museum, but they didn’t really speak to me.
Then on my way out of the galleries, I was stopped cold by a Kerry James Marshall painting of a young Black woman at an art gallery wearing a botanical-print skirt and a loose-fitting turtleneck.
I loved the painting but didn’t really understand it.
I wished I knew more about art—why I liked what I liked or even if I was liking the right stuff.
I took a picture of the painting and then made my way back to my apartment.
I ate a banana and some cantaloupe, and posted a carousel about my museum trip to Instagram.
Scrolled through Insta liking and commenting on my friends’ pictures and then went through and commented on some recent posts tagging me.
I’d gained eleven thousand followers—I was near four million now—since posting that pic with Matthew.
He’d crush Instagram, but of course he’d never get one.
Proper celebrities didn’t need Instagrams. Insta is access—you are making yourself available to the world in exchange for their attention.
Real stars, the ones light-years away from the rest of us, don’t need to strike that bargain.
As I packed for the trip, I grieved my mother.
I thought about how excited she’d be for this audition, how she’d call and text me before auditions no matter how shitfaced she was.
For me, grief isn’t the same thing as missing someone or loving someone; it is the feeling of absence, the awareness of a void.
She would always call me “my little girl” or “my brilliant actress” or “my special baby.” Always hers.
And I still was. I was still hers, still in her thrall.
_____________
My previous movie, the one shot by the Cinematographer, was a romantic dramedy in which my character is falling in love while grieving her father, a stand-up comic who was rarely home with her.
Of course, I did not know when I took the movie that before it wrapped, I would be grieving a parent of my own.
Every movie romance needs an Obstacle, a reason the characters don’t naturally fall into each other.
In our movie, the Obstacle was that my love interest pretends to be married to please his parents, only my character thinks he is actually married.
It’s a stupid Obstacle—most movie Obstacles are—but you only have two hours to tell a story and so you need shortcuts.
In real life, of course, the Obstacle is always confoundingly complex.
For example, Andy Warhol’s Obstacles to romance were: 1.
He felt ugly, 2. He worshipped fame and beauty, 3.
Sex terrified him at least as much as it titillated him, 4.
He struggled to find the person amid the performance.
In my relationship with the Cinematographer, the Obstacle was that he wanted me until he had me, at which point I became progressively less interesting. These are not good movie Obstacles.
In real life, sometimes the Obstacle is that someone’s touch makes you bristle for reasons you do not understand.
The Obstacle is that they are annoying, or immature, or radiate bad vibes, or whatever.
I thought about Kai, and our Obstacle. Partly I didn’t have time for romance, at least not for the kind of all-consuming romance that tended to overtake me.
Partly he just seemed closed off to a romantic connection.
But I liked that Kai liked me. I wanted him to like me more.
I liked that he said “I love you” so much, the casualness of it, and I wanted him to love me more.
I couldn’t even tell if I wanted him because I was so busy wanting him to want me.
I liked the way my breath caught in my throat every time we touched, the way he couldn’t help but walk close to me, the way our knees grazed when we sat next to each other watching Pro Patria Mori.
_____________
When I arrived at LAX that afternoon, a car was waiting for me.
I’d finished the Gods of Andromeda book on the plane.
There’s always so much in a book that can’t fit into the movie, the wanderings and asides that make a story feel real.
But although I’m obviously biased, I tend to find good movies better than the books they’re adapted from, precisely because the movie has no room for air and every scene has to accomplish multiple goals.
Anyway, I’d enjoyed Gods of Andromeda, and as I rode in a black Mercedes directly from the airport to the audition, I kept going back to this one page I’d dog-eared, where Agrippah has a short monologue that isn’t in the screenplay.
Even though I’d never perform it in real life, I thought that if I learned that one monologue, I might really understand Agrippah from within.
_____
I knew the casting director, Nina, a little, and she greeted me at the blacked-out door of her space in West Hollywood.
She walked me back to a room where everyone was seated behind a table—Brian Arawas, two producers, Todd from the studio, and the author, Valentina Leavitt.
Todd was, of course, telling a joke as I walked in.
“So this parrot just won’t stop cursing in the foulest ways imaginable, right?
Finally the owner loses his temper and throws the parrot in the freezer.
The parrot squawks for a minute, and then gets totally quiet.
The owner’s worried he’s killed it, so he opens the freezer and the parrot hops out and squawks, ‘Sir, I am deeply sorry for my bad language. It won’t happen again.
’ And then after a moment, the parrot adds, ‘By the way, what did the chicken do?’ ”
I laughed along with everyone else then said my hellos, careful to shake hands with the author first, who almost bowed when I said how much I loved the book.
Arawas was last in line, a forty-something guy wearing jeans and a tie-dye Grateful Dead T-shirt.
His small, round glasses magnified his already large eyes.
After the hellos, I got set up in front of the camera.
“We’ll do the scene at the start of the orc war first,” Nina said, and I nodded.
As they set up the cameras, I couldn’t help but think of my mom again.
She took me to so many auditions. I was probably eight or nine when I realized that, being drunk day and night, she was also driving drunk when she took me around town, and I remember the discordance of knowing that drunk driving was bad while also knowing that my mom was good.
Mom didn’t want to want what she wanted, but she wanted it anyway. She could not have labored under the delusion that smacking me was an effective strategy for making me a good actor.
Except, then again, I am a rather good actor.
I took a second, exorcised her from my consciousness, and said my name: Juniper Castillo.
Five four. Over eighteen. “The orcs are at the door, my lady,” Nina said, and I fell into Agrippah.
For the next thirty minutes, we ran two scenes five or six times each, with Brian and occasionally Todd giving me notes between.
I needed to prove not just that I could act, but that I was directable.
After we ran the scenes, as Nina started to walk toward the cameras to turn them off, I said, “Can I— There’s a scene in the book, an Agrippah monologue, that I really love. Can I try that even though it’s not in the script?”
I watched Valentina perk up. “Of course,” Brian said, and I launched into it.
“If we abandon our traditions in this war, the orcs have already won. For seven lifetimes, and seven before that, this staff has been held by the women who rule the Realm. This staff matters more than who holds it. But right now, my lords and ladies, I hold it, and I shall not relinquish it, not for man or orc.”
It went on like that for a couple minutes, and I could feel myself saying it from my stomach, like the air was pressed through my belly rather than my lungs.
“That was beautiful,” Valentina said when I finished.
“My God, you are prepared,” Brian added.
“Thanks,” I said. “You want me to take it again, or—”
“No, Juniper,” Brian said. “I think we have everything we need. What a joy to see your Agrippah. What a gift. We’ll be in touch.”