Adam
ADAM
“ C ’mon, let’s do the passion fruit one.”
Roland is getting impatient—and I love it. I’ve been eyeing that particular macaron ever since we opened the box we had delivered from Ladurée yesterday afternoon. There was a full rainbow of flavors inside—rose, lemon, pistachio, hazelnut—but I was saving this one for last. Each flavor affects him slightly differently, he says. Orange blossom gave him a vision of us on a beach in Portugal. Cotton candy had us fucking on a Ferris wheel. We’re treating ourselves this morning because we’re almost done with the book, which is a hilarious non-milestone. But realistically, we’ve been eating like this every day so far this week: long, decadent, and often lustful meals composed of the finest things Roland’s Amex can procure for us. I’m typically naked by the time we get to dessert, but today I’ve managed to keep my underwear on.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” I tease him, even though I want nothing more than to inhale the cookie.
“Yes, come on! Eat it!”
“Maybe I’ll just hold it right here. Look at it for a while. Let my eyes taste it first.”
“Adam, don’t make me beg you.”
“What if I want you to beg me?”
I lick the edge of the macaron, tasting the filling, knowing this brief flick of the tongue will tantalize Roland without launching him into the throes of ecstasy just yet. I want to keep him on the edge a little longer.
“Oh Adam, that’s so good,” he moans.
Our multicourse feasts have been a tacit distraction from what happens next: In three days, we’ve agreed to send the first draft of the manuscript to the publisher—exactly a month from when I arrived. I’ll head to a copy center, scan all the handwritten pages, and send it in, promising to type it all up soon; what matters is that I completed it while Roland was “alive.” I’ll drive to Alta in a rental car, if my hands still work after all this scribbling, so I can clean up the scene before any investigators arrive. And then, somehow, Roland has promised to contact me: He’ll send me an email, he says, after the news blows over. He’ll work something out. But although neither of us has said it out loud, I think we both know the future is uncertain. How can I come back, realistically? So we eat and we fuck, and we fuck and we eat, only breaking to tie up loose ends.
Together, despite the late start and the disagreements along the way, we’ve managed to create something remarkable: a nearly complete memoir that somehow balances amusing anecdotes with moving reflections about the Hollywood closet. Far from creating tonal whiplash, all the elements of Roland’s book somehow work together: a story about falling into the canal at the Venice Film Festival provides the perfect coda for a meditation on the tension of living under the media spotlight. We wrote about Jamie, with Roland dictating some of the passages nearly verbatim. The simpler language suits that section: we wanted it to be raw, honest, and direct. It’s not my finest work; I may never fully recapture the youthful energy of Sodomite . But it’s good. Really good, considering the circumstances under which it was produced.
There’s only one chapter left to write and it’s about—
“Zoya,” Roland says.
Wait. Can he read minds now, too?
“What?” I ask Roland, pausing with the macaron nearly to my lips again.
“Zoya,” he says, louder now, and then, even though his voice cuts out, the blue light beneath the speaker on the island starts flashing rapidly.
“Roland, are you OK?” I ask him. “Why are you bringing up Zoya now?”
It’s a bit odd for him to randomly say his ex-girlfriend’s name in the middle of our macaron moment.
“Adam,” he says, his speech sounding almost as punctuated and perfunctory as the day we met. “Turn around. Zoya.”
I whip around and see a woman standing on the other side of the sliding glass door that opens into the courtyard. She looks a little taller than me, and a lot skinnier, with black hair pulled up into an austere bun and facial features that grow more striking the longer you linger on them. Her face is beautiful, but not perfectly symmetrical, in precisely the sort of way that only makes her more intriguing. She could probably shatter the door with her cheekbones. For now, though, she is just staring at me, a single hand shielding her eyes from the sun, stifling her laughter.
I must be quite a sight: a stranger wearing nothing but Kirkland Signature boxer briefs licking a macaron in her ex-boyfriend’s kitchen. By comparison, she looks overdressed in a pair of Hokas and a two-piece workout set. Dumbfounded, I lose my grasp on the cookie and it falls to the floor, the shell cracking on impact.
Slowly, I raise my hand and wave. What else can I do?
“What is she doing here, Roland?” I whisper through gritted teeth, not wanting her to hear me through the door.
But before he can answer, Zoya is sliding it open. Of course I didn’t shut the latch. Roland and I live in our own world up here, removed from the hoi polloi. It never occurred to me that a rogue supermodel would just roam onto the back lawn one day and interrupt our playtime.
“You must be Adam Gallagher,” she says, sauntering directly into the living area and tossing her car keys onto the glass coffee table with a clang.
My heart is pounding. How the hell am I going to explain what I’m doing?
“And you’re Zoya, right?” I ask even though I’ve seen her face countless times. You’d have to be locked in a nuclear bunker to be unfamiliar with her.
“Sorry to startle you,” she says, not bothering to confirm her identity. “Apparently, my clicker still works. I figured I’d pop in.”
I didn’t know Roland was still communicating with her, but how else could she have learned my name? I’m hoping he’ll chime in and take over, but with a jolt, I remember the obvious: he’s dead. How the fuck am I going to talk my way out of this? If she finds out I’ve been here “alone,” all this time, I’m in trouble. Unless Roland said something to her already? No. He sounded alarmed at the sight of her. This is as much of a shock for him as it is for me.
“I’m sorry,” I say, stalling for time. “I, uh, wasn’t expecting you.”
I look around the room for something to cover myself with, briefly considering the hand towel hanging over the oven door handle but deciding against it.
“Clearly,” she says, devastating me with a single word before sitting down on the white leather sofa. It reads like a power move: she means to stay and has no problem watching me squirm.
Zoya— just Zoya, though I’m sure Wikipedia knows her last name—is a sphinxlike figure, despite her renown. I somehow know her from everything without being able to pinpoint one thing she’s actually been in, and that aspect of her career feels by design, like her handlers want her to have maximum exposure without ever letting her fans get too close to her actual personality. She didn’t “break out” so much as she simply materialized, and then, seemingly overnight, everyone from teenage girls to grown men like Richie were “obsessed” with her, tracking her every move from the Kentucky Derby to the Met Gala. Unsurprisingly, I’ve never been a fan of people whose job it is to simply appear . Call me old-fashioned, but I still believe in the concept of an occupation.
Right now, though, she has a job, and it’s making me sweat bullets.
“Can I, uh, get you something to drink?” I ask her. “Roland’s not … here right now.”
“No, thanks,” she says. “I’m dry fasting.”
I don’t know what that means, and I don’t want to know what that means, so instead I just fidget for a moment before asking, “So, what brings you to these parts?”
These parts? Am I some kind of cowboy now? It’s not like Zoya’s beauty intimidates me; she clearly doesn’t affect me on that level. But there’s something about the way she carries herself—a surface of Zen-like calm covering up a core of almost terrifying confidence—that makes me shrivel in front of her, in more ways than one.
“A little bird told me our mutual friend is planning to write a book,” she says, truly sizing me up now, her eyes moving up from my belly and lingering on my messy bed hair. “And apparently … you are the one he picked to write it.”
I wish there were some kind of escape hatch in the floor I could slide down. But wait. The way she phrased it means it wasn’t Roland who told her. Someone else? Maybe that agent he’s always complaining about? Matt? Somehow, she found out about this top-secret project and she doesn’t seem too pleased about it—or with me.
“I’m usually, you know, wearing clothes,” I stammer, barely managing to lock eyes with her long enough to get the words out. “You caught me at an awkward time.”
“Why do I get the feeling that any time with you is awkward?” she asks, standing now and quickly striding past me toward the front door.
Stupidly, I trail behind her at what feels like a safe distance, though it seems like she could turn and pounce on me at any second.
“What. The. Hell,” Zoya intones when she gets to the foyer, and for a moment, it sounds like she’s condemning my very existence. Then I follow her gaze up to the candy-red Chihuly hanging from the ceiling. She turns around, startled to find that I’ve followed her—or maybe she’s surprised to learn I still exist after quietly decimating me a moment ago.
“That’s new,” she says. “You didn’t stop that from happening?”
“It was there when I got here,” I tell her. “Otherwise, I might have sabotaged it.”
It seems like the best way to get on Zoya’s good side, if she has one, might be to join her in judgment of something else. And in the case of the Chihuly hanging from the ceiling like some enormous rock candy stalactite, that’s an easy tactic to adopt. If I had my way, we’d spend the next three hours criticizing Roland’s art so I can figure out what I’m going to say to her about his predicament, which is now my predicament, too. Do I lie? Do I just … run away? But before either of us speak, Roland suddenly calls out from the kitchen Alexa, “I knew you didn’t like it, Adam! ‘Vibrant’ my ass.”
What the hell is he doing? He couldn’t stay quiet for five minutes? I’m not saying I had the situation under control, but I was working on it.
Zoya looks past me. “Roland?” she asks, and then she glares at me. “You just said he wasn’t home.”
“Oh, he’s home,” I say. “I said he wasn’t here .”
Wordlessly, with the slightest narrowing of her eyes, Zoya lets me know she doesn’t appreciate my pedantry. “I’m failing to see the difference.”
I haven’t had to explain Roland’s condition to anyone else, and suddenly confronted with the task, I realize how difficult it will be. As Zoya walks back into the kitchen to search for the source of the voice, I think about how I’d even begin: Do I keep it simple and say he’s a ghost now? Or do I try to explain right off the bat that he’s some kind of limbo-dwelling entity made out of pure electricity? It took me days to get on board with the idea, and that’s time we don’t have. I hope Roland can come up with an excuse to send her away. He can say he’s sick and quarantining in the other room.
“You can come out now, Roland!” Zoya calls out in a singsong voice, walking all around the kitchen, her sneakers leaving marks on the floor. But when she doesn’t see him anywhere, she turns to confront me again. “What’s going on here?”
“It’s … complicated,” I say, choosing the only word that could begin to approach describing this situation.
“It’s complicated!” she balks, her serene facade cracking. “It’s complicated?! My ex-boyfriend is writing a memoir, there’s a naked man standing in his kitchen, and neither of them can tell me where he is? That’s more than complicated.”
“I can explain, Z,” Roland says, drawing Zoya’s attention to the speaker, but instead of beginning, he abruptly adds, “Hey, uh, Adam? Help me out here?”
Maybe he remembered how poor a job he did convincing me he was dead at first and decided I should jump on this grenade for him. Zoya looks back and forth between me and the speaker, waiting for one of us to say something. I wait a few seconds for the blue light to return. Nope. Apparently, Roland really is leaving this ball in my court.
I thought I was done trying to get strangers to believe the unbelievable. But I suppose I can try to teach the Plan of Salvation one more time—the revised edition.
“You wouldn’t happen to have a watch with you?” I ask Zoya. “Maybe a calculator?”