Adam
ADAM
“ M y ex-boyfriend was a big fan of yours,” I tell Zoya. It’s a ham-fisted way to begin what I’m hoping could become a last-minute interview, but some ego stroking could be the right strategy. “He always said you were ‘iconic.’”
She’s sunning herself in a lounge chair by the pool. It’s not my natural environment, so I slathered myself in SPF 50 before sitting down on the chaise next to hers, doing my best to tolerate a climate my body wasn’t meant to inhabit. She looks perfect, of course. In the day that she’s been here, I’ve not once spotted her from an unflattering angle; I’m not sure such a thing exists.
“What can I say?” she says, her expression unreadable beneath her oversized sunglasses. “The gays love me, Adam. Well, maybe not Roland anymore …”
I know they’ve been fighting. Roland told me last night that she didn’t want the book to happen—that it would interfere with her launching her own sexual wellness brand. He said, “Just let me talk to her,” and then proceeded to spend much of yesterday and all of this morning doing just that. I tried not to be offended. They were together six years. I’m sure they have a lot to discuss. But the morning is usually our time, and we only have today and tomorrow left together. I had a whole parting ceremony planned: I was going to go get In-N-Out—the first thing I ever ate for him, albeit unknowingly—and if we had time after finishing the chapter, maybe we’d watch Charade . Instead, we’re dealing with a home invader who doesn’t even seem happy to be here. Before she came out to the pool, I spotted her storming out of the gym.
“I know Roland cares about you,” I say, trying to strike a reassuring tone without being overly familiar. “He told me about Jamie. About how you helped him afterward.”
I shouldn’t leverage Roland’s trauma in that way, I know. Part of me wants to prove to her how intimate he and I have become. But in my defense, it is technically my job to find out as much about their relationship as possible so I can hastily assemble a chapter. Zoya looks at me, perhaps weighing the fact that Roland told me something so personal, but without being able to see her pupils, that’s only a guess.
“Well, that doesn’t seem to matter to him anymore,” she says.
“I’m sure that’s not true,” I try again, but if there’s one thing she’s not, it’s persuadable.
“Did you know you’re actually taller than him?” she asks, shifting the subject. “He was always self-conscious about his height. He stepped in front of me on red carpets so I didn’t tower over him in pictures. Once, I watched him yell at his publicist to get a picture of him standing next to Sigourney Weaver pulled off Getty.”
She’s clearly peeved at him, but she’s picking at the edges, unwilling to say more about the core of their dispute. I say nothing back.
“And what do you think about this house?” Zoya asks, moving on to the next item in her litany of complaints.
“It’s not my favorite piece of architecture in the world,” I concede.
“You’re too diplomatic, Adam. A 3D printer could have built this place.”
I laugh, which she chooses to interpret as full-throated agreement. “And yet this dead man with terrible taste somehow has you wrapped around his little finger,” she continues, trying to offset the accusation with a playful lift of her shades.
I should have expected her to start looking for weaknesses in my armor. If she can’t get to Roland, it makes sense she’d come for me. I get that she technically got here first, so to speak—that she’s known Roland for years and I’ve only known him for a month. But I would have thought she’d be happy he found someone instead of regarding me with this sneering suspicion. I can give him things she can’t. But if she’s feeling threatened by me for some reason, there’s no sense feeding into the rivalry.
“I’m not, like, his lap dog or something,” I tell her, mounting my defense. “I’m his ghostwriter. I have a job to do.”
“So, this is purely pragmatic, then? A business relationship?” she asks, swinging her legs off the side of the lounge chair and sitting up straight.
It would read as too aggressive for me to join her in an upright position, like I wanted to lock horns with her; instead, I’m left to lie there awkwardly while she stares down at me, the full force of the afternoon sun beaming behind her like the fucking halo around the Madonna. She’s trying to figure out how deep my feelings for Roland really run. Telling her, though, would be handing a sword to my own executioner.
“It’s more than that, I’ll admit,” I say, downplaying the extent of my feelings, trying to sound casual but still believable. “I mean, under normal circumstances, a guy like Roland probably wouldn’t even look at me.”
“No comment,” Zoya says, effortlessly pulling the most damning two-word sequence possible out of thin air. She seems to have a knack for that. If she needs to add another career to her long list of them, she should try her hand at insult comedy.
“I’m not some lovestruck fan,” I protest, trying not to let her get to me, and doing a poor job of it. “I’m here to write a book.”
“And I’m here to ask you not to,” she says. Above us, a cloud drifts in front of the sun, granting me a momentary reprieve from the nimbus of light around her face.
“Not to be pedantic, Zoya, but I signed a contract,” I stammer. “The book has to get done, one way or the other.”
“You signed a contract with a ghost, Adam,” she points out.
“I mean, technically, yes, but he’s here with us. He may not have a body, but he’s able to communicate like he’s still alive. You know that! You’ve been talking with him.”
“‘Talking’ is really an exaggeration,” she says, finally removing her sunglasses. Her uncovered eyes don’t make her any more emotionally accessible, but I decide to take the opportunity anyway.
“Don’t you want him to be able to come out, Zoya?” I ask her. “He never got the chance while he was alive. This is important to Roland. It’s the least we can do for him now.”
“And being his beard for most of the 2010s wasn’t enough? How much has he said about me in your interviews anyway?”
“Only a little,” I answer, quickly and honestly, immediately biting my tongue. “So far.”
“Ah, yes. I see how it is.” Zoya shakes her head. “He’ll talk all about his action movies but not about the woman who propped up his image all those years.”
“If it’s any comfort to you, it took me a while to get him talking about the more sensitive topics,” I try to reassure her, suspecting it might already be too late. “That’s why I’m glad you’re here: you’re the last chapter in his story. In fact, I was hoping we might—”
“That’s the problem, Adam,” she says, cutting me off. “I’m not a part of his story. I’m writing my own story. I’m not some character in your book, I’m a real person. And I’m trying, for the first time in years, to start a life that doesn’t involve him. I want to finally be ‘multihyphenate Zoya’ and not ‘Roland Rogers’s supermodel ex-girlfriend.’ The world will look for any excuse to define a woman by her relationships with men. And if you write this book, I might as well pitch a tent in his shadow and move in.”
Her speech is pretty, albeit canned, complete with a manufactured mic drop moment. But she hasn’t answered my question yet and I’m not going to let it go.
“So you want him to stay in the closet forever?”
The selfishness of that outcome is hard to stomach, not just on the face of it, but because this is supposedly the same woman who helped Roland emotionally recover from what happened to him in Ireland.
“He trusted me with his secrets before,” she says. “I don’t see why that should change now that some bargain-basement author has rolled up.”
I try to brush past the dig to get at the heart of what she just said: she’s hurt that I’ve earned Roland’s confidence, too. But this isn’t some zero-sum game. If you took gay guys with straight women best friends out of the dating pool, homosexuality itself would probably collapse. Isn’t there enough room in this enormous house for both of us?
“I get that I’m a new addition, Zoya,” I tell her. “I didn’t know what I was walking into—in so many ways. But this is how Roland wants to do it.”
She flips her sunglasses back down and shifts her gaze away from me. “Just because you’re fucking him doesn’t mean you get to speak for him, Adam,” she says, rendering me speechless.
There’s apparently nothing I can say that she can’t counter. I get the feeling we could talk for ten more hours and she’d still be volleying everything back to me, stretching this conversation out into the Isner–Mahut of pointless arguments. But we don’t need her permission to publish the book. And it’s not like I was planning on having direct access to her anyway. I can just do another interview with Roland and write the last chapter tomorrow. We’ll stick to the original plan, and these two can hash out their differences while I go to Alta.
“I agree,” I tell her. “We’ll let Roland speak for himself.”
Zoya says nothing in response. Gives nothing. No wonder Richie was a fan of hers: she’s pretty and mean.