Chapter 5
I go upstairs to change into an outfit appropriate for the party—black pants and a short-sleeve button-down from Prada.
I can’t believe how many clothes Prada makes, or how happy they are to send them to me.
They even send me nice socks. Who wears Prada socks?
Me, I guess. This is the part I didn’t tell Jill from The New Yorker—I like nice shit.
I like getting dressed in Prada to go to a Matthew Malone party at a nightclub he has rented out in its entirety.
The club is off Broadway, and I get there at nine fifteen for a nine p.m. start, so it’s mostly empty, but Lon is there. “You look tired, kid,” he says. “I’m so glad I don’t have to do that junket shit. Worst part of movies.”
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s a hell of a business.”
“Sure is, kid. But you look good in Prada. All right, I gotta go schmooze with that guy over there. He’s the fucking head of IP at Mattel.
Can you believe it? They’re making movies out of toys now.
Hot Wheels movie. Barbie movie. American Girl dolls come to life, out on the prairie, dying of consumption.
People say he’s the next big thing, though. ”
_____
Juniper shows up after a while wearing a whisper-light silk shift dress that does rather make it harder to swallow. “I need to talk to you,” I say. We find a quietish corner and I tell her about the sweaty guy being a studio plant.
“Pretty nasty,” she says.
“I’ll say.”
“It was good press, though. You gotta give ’em that.”
“It traumatized you.”
“I’ve seen worse.”
“You’re not pissed?”
“I mean, they didn’t put us in danger or anything.”
I don’t know what to say to her after that, so I head to the bar to order a beer and get Juniper a club soda. I think about how sometimes I used to work parties like this one for extra cash, used to carry around nibbles for people. Now I am the people.
I am so goddamned lucky, and so goddamned immune to my own luck.
“How was The New Yorker?” Juniper asks when I return.
“Intense. Smart lady. Probably got me to say too much. What’d you do?”
“Photo shoot, mostly, for Marie Claire. They had me in fifteen different looks. Then I did an easy interview with them.”
“In case it’s in the story, she asked me if I was in love with you.”
“And you said?”
“I said sometimes.”
Juniper laughs and shakes her head. “So you told her the truth,” she says finally.
Juniper knows everybody at the party, so she starts circulating.
Charles Oldham is there, the guy I beat out for Gods of Andromeda.
I talk to him for a while about the new Edgar Wright movie he just booked, and he makes it sound very cool.
Everybody’s so good at making their lives look amazing.
Even though I know Charles wants the part I have, I still feel a little jealous of the one he’s ended up with.
Then, at last, Matthew shows up around ten, wearing a tan suit with a button-down shirt that is hardly buttoned.
His chest hair is showing. Matthew is, if nothing else, sculpted.
He finds me and hugs me and I ask him if he wants a drink and he says he can’t because he has TV in the morning and anyway he drove his motorcycle here.
I ask him where he’s staying and he says he has a place in the city.
“Actually,” he says, “come over tomorrow after press. Bring Junie. We’ll have dinner.
” I want to tell him about what Todd did, but Juniper has made me feel like maybe it’s not a big deal.
Lon introduces me to the guy from Mattel, who tells me their Hot Wheels movie is going to be incredible, and I tell him that sounds amazing, even though a Hot Wheels movie in fact sounds to me like the end of something important, like the final breath in the long life of art itself.
While the Mattel guy talks at me, I’m trying to figure out what art even is, why we make it, and indeed whether I’m making it, or whether I’m making something else.
I want to talk to Juniper about this, or about anything, but she’s got her arm around Charles Oldham, and they’re both talking to two girls who look like models.
After a while there’s no one I want to talk to and I’m a little drunk, so I leave.
Juniper texts me to come to an afterparty at someone’s place, but I don’t much feel like going out.
I think maybe I like being alone too much for this job.
What I really want is for Juniper to come over to my hotel room and for us to watch a movie together, slightly-but-not-confirmedly cuddling in that way we have.
Maybe I also want more than that, but I can’t process the wanting more, can’t allow myself to want it, because what if she doesn’t want to be imagined that way?
Isn’t it a kind of violation to think about someone as they don’t wish to be thought about?
He would always tell me that he thought about me constantly, that he loved remembering what we did together and imagining what we might do, and I didn’t like him thinking about me.
_____
I don’t usually look for what people are saying about me, but when I get back to my hotel room, for some reason—drunkenness, probably—I go on Twitter and search for my name. I read the first result.
I went to school with Kai Laramie and he is not the hero everyone says. He didn’t stop our pedo teacher; some other kid did. But Kai gets all the credit because he’s famous. He’s typical Hollywood—he doesn’t reveal the pedos, he indulges them.
Only six retweets and fourteen likes, but still I feel a surge of dread. It’s true, too. I didn’t stop our pedo teacher.
I try to go to sleep, but can’t stop thinking about that phrase.
He indulges them. Had I indulged him? I remember once I asked to go to his house.
I didn’t like doing stuff at school—it felt way too dangerous.
I asked to go to his house and he said sure.
He only lived a few blocks away. His house was low-ceilinged and dingy and poorly lit with overhead can lights that were either burnt out or too bright, and he offered me a cup of coffee and then he played with my cock through my pants and then took it out and told me we didn’t have to rush for once, and I let all of that happen. Was that indulgence or survival?