Roland
ROLAND
“ I can’t say I’m surprised you died skiing,” Zoya says, adjusting the incline on my $10,000 Woodway treadmill. “But I’ll spare you the ‘I told you so.’”
“How generous of you,” I tell her through the mounted TV in the corner of the room. I’d like to figure out how to display my face on the screen, but despite all my technological conquests, that particular feat remains beyond me. Maybe the next generation of ghosts will figure it out.
Breaking the news to Zoya was far easier than convincing Adam. The only complication was the bad dream I had as soon as she walked in the door—another one, already . The stress of her sudden appearance overloaded me, or “fried my circuits,” as I’ve come to think of it. I blacked out for a minute, only waking up when she and Adam started mocking my new chandelier. I should have kept my figurative mouth shut, but I couldn’t help myself—and besides, I knew Zoya wasn’t going to go away until she got to the bottom of it. If I’m too much for Adam sometimes, dealing with her is like bare-handing plutonium.
Frankly, I thought them making fun of my Chihuly was part of my nightmare at first, but it turned out to be all too real. Zoya never did see my vision for this place. Z tried to stop me from buying it, in fact. “Have some taste,” she urged me. “Get something midcentury in the Hills like I did.” But I didn’t need to be over there with the strivers, telling stories on Conan about how Robert Pattinson came over to borrow a cup of sugar. I was a goddamn movie star.
After I interrupted their little mutual hatred society, it surprisingly only took three hours to persuade Zoya of my state. I was expecting a long uphill battle. She had two witnesses to Adam’s one, as much as she regarded him with suspicion. On her insistence, I recited all sorts of phrases on command from random speakers to prove I wasn’t some kind of AI construct: “I’m Roland Rogers and my house is ugly,” she made me say, along with “Leonardo DiCaprio deserved the Oscar for The Revenant .”
“You swear this is real?” she asked me, and I said yes, then she put the same question to Adam. He looked like he was going to wet himself, but he managed to nod in response. And apparently, that was good enough for her. Turns out there was some genuine belief hiding behind her vaguely spiritual side all along. I’d wager she spent half of our six-year relationship at retreats: the one where she did ayahuasca with Miley Cyrus, the one where she didn’t talk for two weeks except when she stubbed her toe on a meditation stool, the one where she only drank mushroom tea for five days until she said she saw all her mothers and grandmothers holding hands in a line that stretched all the way to the beginning of time. I used to tease her about being woo-woo, especially because she was so pragmatic and business-minded when it came to her career. But the joke is on me now.
“Did you ever even use this thing?” Zoya asks between breaths, running faster now.
“Lucas always said cardio would ruin my gains.”
“Lucas is,” Zoya pants, “an idiot.”
“Now that we can agree on.”
Yesterday, after she found out, Zoya ran the gamut from uncontrollable weeping to sorrow to outright indignance. In the afternoon, she was sobbing at the fact that the last time we saw each other was at the premiere of a movie neither of us even liked; today, I get the feeling that my death is more of an annoyance to her. But what might seem to the outside observer like callousness is just an unusually fast emotional metabolism. Zoya lives her life on permanent fast-forward. If she didn’t, she never would have gotten where she was—and she’s still got further to go, as she has made eminently clear.
I want to fire Matt for telling her I was working on my memoir but I’ll be done with my agent soon enough as it is. I’m sure he was hoping she’d talk me out of it—and she’s certainly tried. Zoya spent her morning yoga session telling me again about the plan for her new sex toy “The Z,” detailing how the book would interfere with the all-but-guaranteed success of her “Goop pivot,” as she unironically phrased it.
“Gwyneth, Dakota, Cara, Lily—they’re all in the sexual wellness space now, Roland,” she told me, rattling off the names just like I’m sure her team did when they pitched this to her. “These days, launching your own vibrator is the best way to bypass celebrity spinsterhood.” When I pointed out she was only thirty-four years old, she countered that I never had to worry about the length of my runway. And it’s true enough. Sylvester and Arnold are doing Expendables movies deep into their seventies. But those guys do have one obvious advantage on me.
“I hate to point this out,” I told her, “but I’m dead.”
She’s been in a prickly mood ever since. I didn’t have much time to connect with Adam last night, but I told him the basics before he went to bed: Zoya hated the idea of the memoir, but he didn’t have to worry. The plan was the plan. I just needed some time to talk to her about it. In fact, this might even be an opportunity for him to get material for that last chapter, I said. Everyone’s first impression of Zoya, Adam’s included, is that she’s a firecracker, and I don’t blame them. But what people don’t realize is that there’s a deep well of compassion for me beneath her crackly exterior. Much like Adam, when she found out what that guy in Ireland did to me, she offered to kill him—except I actually believed she could do it. She works out even more than I did during Crash .
Zoya nudges the treadmill speed down to a walking pace so she can sip some water out of her Stanley. “Listen, honey. Can’t we find a compromise here? I can just tell people you were gay later on, when it won’t interfere. There’s nothing your little boyfriend knows about you that I don’t.”
She proposed the idea yesterday, and I’m still not a fan.
“I don’t understand why me publishing my memoir would hurt your sex toy launch,” I tell her. “We broke up years ago. Or we made ‘the intentional choice to spend time apart’ or however the fucking publicists phrased it. It’s been over for a while. You really think people will care?”
“If my sex symbol of an ex comes out as gay? Yes!” she half shouts, throwing her hands up in exasperation before grabbing the rails for stability. “People will make all sorts of hacky jokes. ‘ Now we know why she had to make her own vibrator! ’ Can you really not see that, Roland?”
“I think you overestimate the public’s attention span,” I point out.
“I think you underestimate their sexism.”
“And battling homophobia means nothing to you?”
If we’re going to play the identity game, I’m going to pull out the only card in my hand. Frankly, when I spar with her, I need every advantage I can get. Zoya grabs her towel and daubs away the light sweat forming on her forehead.
“That’s unfair, Roland. You know I’m an ally. To you most of all.”
The reminder isn’t lost on me. When we went on that first date at the behest of my publicist, I was still reeling from the assault, even though it had happened three years prior. I had been utterly alone with it. It’s not like I could go to therapy; even people who’ve taken an oath of confidentiality can leak things to the press. Sitting at my favorite table in Catch, I made the almost impulsive decision to tell her everything, sensing a certain shrewdness in her that I needed in my corner. I had just turned forty, I was staring down the barrel of another decade of isolation, and filming Crash 5 felt like punching in and out of a factory job—but then in walked Zoya, full of fire and fury. I wanted that scrappiness in my own life. Unlike my other dates, too, she didn’t try to drape herself all over me, or kiss me when she knew the paps had an angle. She was young and brash and self-possessed, with power that could be channeled.
I knew my instincts had led me in the right direction when she cared more about the attack than she did that I was gay. She wanted to know how I was doing, whether I had any lingering injuries, and whether I went to physical therapy afterward. She could recommend someone, she said. But the fact that I was gay didn’t seem to surprise her at all. Zoya was already thinking several steps ahead; intrigued, and more than a little calculating, she saw what we could accomplish together.
That was our Casablanca “beginning of a beautiful friendship” moment: we saw that we could be allies, the two of us against a changing industry that wanted to pigeonhole us. Roland Rogers and Zoya. It was a cross-category combination no one saw coming. I was in the stratosphere compared to her at the time, but she had a different kind of fame: not tethered to movies or records, but to a way of life. We both had what the other was missing. For a time, we made everything possible for each other: So what if Zoya had only acted in a few things before? Thanks to me, she could leapfrog up the call sheet on any project in town. In return, Zoya not only shored up my tough guy Crag persona, she also opened new doors: I would never have done a line of luxury men’s grooming products if it weren’t for her, and I made a killing off those profit margins. A glass bottle of “whiskey-infused shave cream” for fifty bucks? Incredible. And that move didn’t seem like it came out of left field for me because I was with her. Together, we were no longer two people, we were “Zo-Ro,” or “Zorro” as the gossip rags labeled us. I lifted her profile, and she bolstered mine. It was symbiosis at its finest.
But the partnership couldn’t last forever, and we knew it from the start. Eventually, much later than I thought she would do it, Zoya told me she had to move on.
“You weren’t my ally, you were my friend,” I tell her now. “And I’m asking if, as a friend, you can understand why I’d want to do this?”
“I’m still your friend,” she says. “But I was also your beard. I gave you six years, and you can’t give me a chance to get out from under you?”
I always hated that she called herself that, especially because I taught her the term. Her generation doesn’t have as much use for it as mine did. “You make it sound like our arrangement was one-sided, Z,” I point out. “Like you didn’t get anything out of it.”
“I mean, of course I did, but we both know I could have spent those years very differently. Every man in the world was sliding into my DMs. Including Chris Pine, Roland. Chris Pine .”
I resent the implication. “I wasn’t stopping you from doing anything extracurricular.”
“No, but can you imagine how the fans would react if anyone found out? We wouldn’t be ‘couple goals’ anymore”—and here Zoya dramatically rolls her eyes—“I wasn’t going to do that to us.”
She’s right about that much. Before my arrangement with Zoya, I had no shortage of attention from women. But after I showed up on her Instagram for the first time, an obsessive army of hyper-online girls centered their lives on us, analyzing everything from our outfits to our body language to which side my hair was parted on when we were seen in public. They spent more time thinking about our relationship than we did—and we were ostensibly in it.
But if she had really wanted that freedom, there wasn’t anything stopping her from pursuing fame through different avenues. At the time we got together, she was still working as Gwyneth’s private yoga teacher, but she had already started modelling. If I’m remembering right, she had even booked her first guest role on an HBO show and was chatting with producers about a single. She was buzzy enough to get a write-up in Vulture and a few blurbs in Page Six . Maybe she wouldn’t be a mononym with hundreds of millions of followers if it weren’t for me, but I’m convinced she would have become Zoya anyway. All the building blocks were in her hands already; she just wanted them to come preassembled.
“There didn’t have to be an us if you didn’t want there to be,” I remind her.
Zoya abruptly turns off the treadmill and rides to the end of the deck, stepping off it with the litheness and elegance of a panther. Her poise, though, cannot mask her displeasure. She always wants to skip to the part where I admit she’s right—an impatience I once attributed to her youth until I realized I could be in hospice and she’d still talk to me like we were in a college debate club.
She takes a seat on the nearest weight deck. I’ve actually used this equipment before. Too many times. Even seeing her on it brings back traumatic memories of Lucas forcing me to do chest presses until I threw up. She turns her gaze up to the TV now. I’ve noticed Adam often doesn’t know where to look when he’s talking to me but Zoya likes to stare directly at whatever object I’m inhabiting at the time, gazing at my very soul.
“I wanted us, Roland. I made my choice. But in hindsight, the way I lived my life had to change a lot when I was with you. Your life didn’t change at all. You just trained and filmed and skied—lather, rinse, repeat. And now you’re dead and my life is still going to be bent around yours.”
“At least you have a life,” I protest, and we’ve officially ended up back where we began.
At many points in my relationship with Zoya, I questioned why I was arguing so much with someone I wasn’t even having sex with. It’s comforting, in a twisted sort of way, that she can still lead me around in a circle. The worst part, though, is when she falls quiet. That’s when I know she’s getting ready to strike the finishing blow.
“When’s the last time you were in a grocery store, Roland?” she asks me, after a pause. “And that shack you go to in Alta doesn’t count.”
She turns her water bottle over in her hands and tugs on the strap of her sports bra, waiting for me to answer. I try to remember. I don’t see the relevance, but that doesn’t mean a noose isn’t being tied around my neck. I might have stopped at a Vons a few years ago to impulse buy a Coke.
“I don’t know, 2018? What does that have to do with anything?”
“Walk through any checkout line since the split and all the tabloid headlines about me are actually about you: ‘Zoya Steps Out with New Man’ or ‘Zoya Shows Roland Rogers What He’s Missing in See-Through Mini Dress’”—I wonder if Zoya has memorized these; that would be so like her—“Only now are they starting to taper off. If you think this book won’t affect me, you really do live in a bubble. But you always did, didn’t you?”
I’m so upset that I accidentally send a burst of static through the TV before realizing my mistake. It’s such an impotent display of emotion that it immediately registers as humiliating.
“Was that you?” she asks, giggling.
“Yeah, it was me, OK?” I say, trying not to raise my voice but knowing I’ve got to get my words out before she tries to claim a premature victory. “And I don’t live in a bubble because I am not alive Zoya, I am dead. D-E-A-D, dead . And I won’t be like this forever. I’ve been having nightmares lately. I can feel the end coming. This is the last thing I need to do before I go. You can launch your vibrator another time, because you still have a fucking heart—or at least I thought you did.”
Standing and smoothing out her leggings, Zoya takes a few steps away from the weight deck. Her expression is hard to decipher: Hurt? Concern? Anger? I feel like I’m trying to box with her, but she’s playing poker with me.
“Nightmares?” she asks, holding her cards close to the chest.
“Yes. Spending time with Adam seemed to stop them for a while, but they came back, and they’re getting more frequent. Last night, while you both were asleep, Chris Evans picked me last for a celebrity kickball game and then my dad’s Corvette ate me alive.”
Zoya laughs again. “It ate you?”
“It used its hood as a mouth and chomped me to bits—and it’s not funny, despite how it sounds when I say that out loud! These dreams are terrifying, Z.”
I want her to display at least some shadow of the concern she used to feel for me, but she only offers, “I’m sorry,” then adds after a pause, “Does your pet know that you think you’re dying?”
Even in acknowledging my fears, she has to inject an element of doubt. I hope if Zoya becomes a ghost one day, she has nightmares about mopping ass sweat off the floor of that dinky Pilates studio she used to work at out in the Valley. Maybe then she’ll find some sympathy. But for now, she’s struck a nerve. There’s a reason I’ve been keeping that information from Adam.
“There’s no point worrying him,” I explain. “He’s only got two days to finish it. I think this is going to help me, Zoya. It might be what I need to pass to the other side in peace.”
“Why him anyway, Roland?” she asks, ignoring my hopeful speculation. “He looks like he crawled out of an Old Navy discount bin.”
Her contempt for Adam was clear from the moment she walked in on him—well, on us , but she didn’t know that yet. I clarified earlier this morning that we were, in fact, doing something sexual together, and she wrinkled her nose at the thought, adding that she always hoped I would be with a man one day, just someone “better.” It’s rich that she took a potshot at me for not going to Albertson’s when she acts like Adam is my Igor. If anything, she’s the one who’s out of touch with the world. It’s been years since she stood next to a person who still has the face they were born with. There’s no justification for Zoya taking out her anger on Adam: yes, he’s writing the book, but I hired him to do it. She can’t be jealous of him, can she? We never had that kind of relationship.
“He’s a good writer, Zoya,” I tell her. “He deserves this chance.”
Zoya pivots and takes three long strides toward the door, her running shoes squeaking with each step. Before leaving, though, she turns to face the TV again. And for a second, I’m certain I see a flash of genuine, unfiltered emotion on her face. She looks embarrassed by her own pain.
“What do I deserve, Roland?” she asks, and as she walks away, the question lingers.