Adam
ADAM
“ I t’s nice to speak with you properly,” I tell Zoya, trying to start things off on an amicable note, but she’s not interested in any polite overtures.
“I hope you realize we’re only doing this for you at this point,” she says, idly tinkering with the Newton’s cradle on Roland’s desk. “You heard what he said last night.”
What hurt most about overhearing Roland second-guess the book is that I thought he cared as much about our connection as I did. We’ve been working on this together for twenty-nine days, only for him to doubt it on the eve of my departure. This was our labor of love, and now he’s thinking about scrapping it? Does that mean he’s done with me, too? I barely slept after looking for Roland last night, wondering why he wouldn’t say anything back to me and fearing the worst. Maybe he’s not thinking straight. His conversation with Zoya was the first I’ve heard of any “nightmares.” He said he was “fading.” I knew that it might be unrealistic to expect we could be together in some long-term way. But still, I thought he would have told me if something inside him started … shifting. Wouldn’t he want to warn me? Was he planning to just disappear after everything we’ve shared? Can ghosts get dementia? If he’s not himself anymore, then I’m the one who needs to hold the course and honor his last wishes.
“You know this interview isn’t just for me,” I tell Zoya, already losing my battle to stay calm. “He always wanted to write this book. He didn’t waver on that until you showed up and he started having these ‘nightmares.’ I’m worried he’s losing it.”
“Oh? I think he’s coming to his senses,” she says, pulling the steel ball on the end of the Newton’s cradle sideways and letting it swing. “I’ve known him for a decade, Adam. You’ve been here, what? Three weeks?”
“A month,” I protest.
“Ooh, a month,” she says, mockingly. “When’s the wedding?”
The desk toy clicks and clacks maddeningly in the background as I reassess my approach. Her brain is apparently operating at lightning speed, while I’m still waking up. I had just barely sat down at the kitchen island this morning to have a banana when Zoya walked in, announced, “Let’s get this over with,” and marched off down Roland’s hallway, expecting me to follow her, which I did. When I got to the study, she was already seated at the desk, glaring at me. She still sees me as a threat, but why? What does Roland still mean to her? If she can bring herself to talk to me without going for the jugular, that’s what I intend to find out.
“Please, Zoya. Roland asked you to sit down with me, and you agreed to give it a shot. We’re not off to the best start, but—”
“Fine, ask me your questions,” she interrupts, suddenly reaching out and stopping the desk toy. “It’s not like it matters anyway. Roland has made up his mind.”
If that’s what she needs to believe, I’m going to let her.
“OK. Why Roland Rogers?”
I press my pen to paper, getting ready to write.
“What do you mean?” Zoya asks.
“You could have dated anyone at the time you got together with Roland. Why him? Especially if you knew he was gay?”
Zoya pauses, leaning back in the leather desk chair. She looks like the fucking Godfather and I feel like I’m about to get whacked.
“Roland was famous, he was constantly in the headlines, and my publicist thought it would be a fantastic idea to be seen with him,” Zoya rattles off, like she’s sharing a recipe. “You figure it out. This isn’t hard to piece together. Did you know anything about how Hollywood works before taking this on? You’re like a baby deer. So wholesome.”
Zoya tells the story so simply, and it matches what little Roland has told me about her motivations for entering the relationship. But it sounds too practiced, like she’s reciting it to herself as much as she is to me.
“But you cared about him,” I tell her. “He confided in you. You supported him. And you were together for six whole years …”
“Oh, he does math, too!” Zoya says, in a tone of mocking praise. “I can see why he likes you.”
Is she going to insult me this entire interview?
“That’s a long time,” I point out, losing my patience already. “Especially if he wasn’t fucking you.”
It’s mean. I’d like to think I would never talk to someone like that. But I’m not going to let her walk all over me anymore. She only smirks at the crude observation.
“So?”
Does she really not see why I might be confused? She’s Zoya, the embodiment of heterosexual feminine desire, and I’m supposed to believe she spent six years sexless?
“You were fine with that? You didn’t care at all?”
“Do you care that he can’t fuck you?” she counters. “That you just have to touch yourself while he watches?”
The anger washes away my morning lethargy in an instant. “Look,” I say, finally snapping, “I don’t doubt that you were a clout chaser once. Sounds like you still are. But I don’t think you’d stay with Roland for six years for a boost you could have gotten in two. I have an idea of what you meant to him, but what the fuck did he mean to you?”
“‘Clout chaser,’ huh?” she smirks. “And what does that make you?”
God, she is infuriating.
“I fucking love him, Zoya!” I shout, surprised to hear the word come out of my mouth.
But I do love him. I love his vanity and his wit and his tenderness. I love his laugh and his longing for a life he didn’t get to lead. I even love his stupid fucking chandelier; I love that he loves it at least. But she’s probably going to take my blurted-out confession and use it as a cudgel.
Zoya stares at me, dumbfounded. I look down at my feet, feeling the tears form.
“I’m … I’m sorry I yelled,” I say, muted now, trying to do some belated damage control. “I just … I don’t want to lose him.”
I focus on my shoes, bracing myself for her brutal riposte. I’ve shown her my weak spot and she’s probably getting ready to drive a dagger through it. But when she responds, she sounds more curious than anything else.
“You really care about him, huh?” she asks, and all I can do under her scrutiny is nod. “I mean, I can understand why you might be into him. You’re right. I wouldn’t have been with Roland if there wasn’t something more there.”
I peel my eyes off the floor. The expression on Zoya’s face is more pity than kindness, but I’ll take it.
“We never had sex, but I guess he told you that,” she continues. “It’s not like I thought I could change him. But damn if he isn’t the most charming person alive. Well. Was the most charming person alive. That’s the thing—even without a body, he’s still got it, doesn’t he? He has to talk to you through that speaker hanging around your neck and he still managed to sweep you off your feet.”
“His charisma made up for everything else?” I ask, meeting her gaze in earnest, sniffling to hold the tears back. “Everything he couldn’t give you?”
“Do you understand what he has?” Zoya asks me in return, shaking her head as though she can’t believe my ignorance. “Roland probably told you a tall tale about how hard he had to grind to get where he was, I mean, his story is remarkable. It would have made a great book: all those auditions, and then he got his big break. But Roland didn’t have to work. Not really. He had it , Adam. The X factor. That indefinable something that made you want to be around him. You could watch him watch paint dry and still be entertained. Roland could have been born in Siberia and he’d have ended up in the exact same place. That’s how powerful his dazzle can be.”
And Zoya doesn’t have dazzle? Last I checked, she had 250 million Instagram followers.
“But you’ve got—”
She cuts me off. “Nope. Sorry. I never had it. And to be blunt, the gays need to get some higher standards for who they ‘stan.’ As many times as Anna Wintour puts me on the cover of Vogue , I’ll never be Audrey Hepburn. Deep down, I know people can feel the effort in everything I do. They think I’m beautiful, and they like my ‘brand’ or whatever, but no one thinks I’m some generational talent. That was Roland. He caught flak for the Crash movies, but he was still a legend. If I ever make a misstep, though, I’ll be thrown out in a heartbeat, replaced by next year’s model.”
I can’t believe I’m feeling sympathy for someone who can make my annual income off a single social media post, but the sensation wriggles its way into my heart anyway. I scribble down the gist of what she’s saying, still trying to understand what Roland’s Hollywood prowess has to do with her forgoing sex for so long.
“Him being charming was good enough for you? For six years?”
Zoya leans forward now, her expression almost pleading. “Is that really so hard to believe, Adam? I loved him, too, you know. It wasn’t a conventional relationship, but I wanted to be with him any way I could.”
I take my best guess about how that worked out. “And eventually you wanted to be with someone? Like, fully be with someone?”
“Sure, that was part of it,” Zoya says. “But I also realized that no matter how long I spent with him, his charms weren’t going to rub off on me.”
Six years is a long time. But I understand why she’d want to be near him that long. You can’t get a contact high from charisma, but that hasn’t stopped millions from trying. It explains Mormonism in the early days. It explains Taylor Swift.
“You’re … charming,” I try to tell her, but she just laughs, knowing I barely forced the compliment out of my mouth.
“No, I have to try, Adam,” Zoya says. “Roland never tried. Even on his bad days, the clouds parted just for him. I thought maybe if I stuck with him long enough, I could learn his secrets.”
“And you didn’t?”
“No. At least none that I could use. I realized he has a level of self-belief that I’m not sure women can have without getting cut down to size. I realized he has a great head of hair and eyes as blue as Lake Louise. But there’s no guidebook to get what he has.”
I can’t compare my world directly to Zoya’s but I’m struck by how similarly I feel about my own profession. I’m never going to be one of those waiflike, purple prose–writing authors who gets cover blurbs like “delicate and masterful” or “a powerful meditation on X, Y, and Z.” There’s no National Book Award in my future. The New York Times is not going to tour my apartment, and if they did, all they’d find are piles of unfolded laundry. I’ve accepted that. Or I’m working on accepting it anyway.
“Most of us have to try,” I tell her. “All I’ve ever done is try.”
But just when I think we’re forging a connection, Zoya executes her coup de grace.
“Which is exactly why we shouldn’t do this book,” she says, pointedly joining us together in that devilish plural pronoun. “This won’t make one bit of difference for Roland. Let’s let him be Roland, and let’s you and I stay here in the world of the living—the world of the trying . He got what he needed out of this life. We deserve a chance to do the same.”
I haven’t listened to a sermon in years, but I still have an uncanny sense for when I’m being bullshitted. Zoya’s wrong. She’s a rhetorical ninja, but she’s wrong. I think Roland Rogers was scared every day he had a pulse. I think he’s still scared now. I think his charisma was a form of survival—a shield against a world that wouldn’t have accepted who he was. I think if he could have given Zoya his charisma the way you can give someone a kidney, he would have. Is he a gauche asshole with no taste and more money than any single human should be allowed to have? Yes. But he spent his whole life trying to protect a soft, squishy heart. He’s still that little boy in Georgia, and now he’ll never get to grow up.
“You may think you know him better than I do, but I spent this past month interviewing him about his entire life,” I tell her. “Some things were easier for Roland. But he tried, too.”
“A month is nothing,” she pushes back, the momentary détente between us crumbling.
“It’s long enough to know what he wants,” I insist.
“Then let’s ask him if he’s made up his mind yet,” Zoya says, pressing her chair back from the desk. “Unless you’re scared of what he’s going to say.”
“Right now?”
I’ve barely written two pages of shorthand so far. I have enough for a paragraph of the book at most.
“Right now,” she confirms, and before I can protest, Zoya is walking out the door.
When I applied to go on my mission, I had to send reams of paperwork to Church headquarters in Salt Lake City, and in return they sent me back a form letter telling me where they had decided I would spend the next two years of my life. All they did was fill in a blank with “Las Vegas, Nevada” and pay for postage, my fate likely decided by a spreadsheet. I feel that same helplessness now as I follow Zoya down the hall, toward the kitchen, searching for Roland. He could say “no” and I’d have to go back to Millburn, without any sense of closure for this whole experience. Does he even want to stay in touch, still? Does he even like me anymore? Or will I just have to remember him by the scribbles in the worn Moleskine that I set down on the island as I follow Zoya into the kitchen. He could say “yes,” though, and she would, I hope, call off her crusade. It’s another blank to be filled in, but this time, Roland Rogers is holding the pen.
“Roland, are you here?” I ask.
Zoya and I are standing on opposite sides of the island, waiting for an appliance to buzz, crackle, or whir, but nothing happens. I look down at the shower speaker hanging around my neck. The battery light is green, but it’s silent. Should we go to his room? Check the Jacuzzi? No, he usually sticks to his regular haunts. My pulse accelerates. Is he gone already? No. It can’t be.
“Did you check in with him this morning?” I ask Zoya, my eyes widening.
Looking back now, it’s strange Roland didn’t pipe up when I started peeling my banana; me eating a phallic food is usually pretty effective bait for him. But if Zoya didn’t talk to him this morning, either, then …
“No, I thought he was with you,” she tells me, which concerns me even more.
That means neither of us have heard from him since I walked in on their conversation last night.
“Is he—” I start to ask her, choking on the words.
Before I can finish, though, Roland speaks from the Alexa on the island.
“I’m here. How’d the interview go, you two? Are you playing nice yet?”
His voice sounds weaker, but still cheerful, like he’s masking exhaustion.
“We decided to come see how you’re feeling about the book,” Zoya says, and again she is using that “we” loosely.
I’m worried we’re putting too much pressure on him. “Roland, if you’re tired, you don’t have to—” I say, but Zoya cuts me off.
“You can’t keep dragging this out, honey,” she says. “It’s not fair to me. And it’s not fair to him, either.”
Does she know something I don’t? Did Roland say something more definitive about the book before I started listening in on their conversation? Because what I overheard was still full of “maybes.” Roland takes an eternity to respond.
“Adam, I’m sorry,” he says. “I’ve thought about it and … I need to give Zoya a chance to start over. She deserves that after everything she’s done for me.”
My heart plummets. A month’s worth of work, a month of the most bizarre but unexpectedly fulfilling relationship I’ve ever had, and Roland’s pulling the plug on it all, just like that? Was his late-night conversation with Zoya a way to shore up a decision he had already made? How long has he been having second thoughts about this? About us? If he felt the same way about me that I feel about him, he wouldn’t do this.
“But—but what about coming out?” I stutter. “Telling everyone?”
I remember flattering him a month ago by lying about how important I thought his book would be. But I truly believe it now. For the man who played Crag Dynamite to open up not just about being gay, but about surviving an assault, about feeling alone and being too scared to search for love? Even if he’s done with me, as shattering as that thought is, he shouldn’t give up on that.
“I think maybe everyone who needed to know I’m gay is in this room,” Roland says. “The book doesn’t matter anymore. What matters is …”
His voice tapers off. He must be in bad shape. Should we eat something? I look around the kitchen for some food. Another banana, maybe? But Zoya doesn’t seem concerned. I spot her trying to disguise a smile. She doesn’t look gleeful, exactly—it’s more of a quiet triumph—but I can tell she feels like she has won, nonetheless. I know it isn’t very sex-positive of me to think this, but I can’t believe she persuaded Roland to tank his memoir over a fucking vibrator. People don’t really need a new way to masturbate, do they? Hell, they did it with their hands for millennia. Or maybe she just resents him for being charming? Isn’t that what she was trying to tell me in that sorry excuse for an interview?
“Roland?” I ask. “If you can hear me, don’t do this. You can’t—”
“He can,” Zoya cuts me off.
And then, with a suddenness that stuns me, she reaches for my Moleskine on the island. I race her to grab it, but she’s faster. I should have taken more spin classes.
“Z what are you doing?” Roland is saying, dumbfounded, as if jarred from a deep sleep.
“He’s not going to accept that it’s over, Roland,” Zoya says, pulling the notebook close to her, like she’s afraid I’m going to lunge at her—and I might. “If you’re really calling off the book, he doesn’t need it anymore.”
“Zoya, please,” I say, taking a slow step clockwise around the island. “Give it back to me.”
“Zoya, stop,” Roland tells her. “Let him keep the notebook.”
Vindication.
“See?” I prod her, stretching my hand out so she can return it.
“No, Roland,” Zoya says, and as she does, she starts backstepping through the living area, toward the sliding glass door that leads to the courtyard. Is she going to throw it in the pool? “He can take what you said and try to sell it to the tabloids or put it on his fucking blog or write some tell-all. I don’t trust him.”
That’s when I decide to run. It’s impulsive. It’s ungentlemanly. But book or no book, Zoya is not going to discard the only record of the time I spent with Roland. He might want to forget about me, but I’m not ready to forget about him. I sprint out from behind the island and charge toward her, but she’s already out the door, racing through the courtyard. The former fitness instructor to the stars is as quick on her feet as her reputation might suggest, and it takes everything in me not to lag hopelessly behind.
“Stop!” Roland is rasping from the Jacuzzi speaker behind me, but Zoya probably can’t hear him over the sound of my panting as I hop over the corner of the pool.
She still has the notebook gripped in one hand, the pages flapping as she sprints onto the grass. But even though she’s outpacing me, she doesn’t have anywhere left to go: before long, the back lawn gives way to the cliffside and the ocean below. A few feet from the edge, she stops and turns to face me. Even if I wanted to tackle her—and I kind of do—I couldn’t do it without both of us plummeting into the sea. Instead, I stop in front of her, and raise my hands, pleading.
“Zoya, please, just hand me the notebook and I’ll go.”
“I’m sorry, Adam,” she says.
She holds it up above her right shoulder—the bound pages holding the memories of the man I love, even if he doesn’t love me back. The pages that could help so many people feel less alone. I know what she’s going to do next. But by the time she throws the notebook off the cliff, I am already leaping over the edge, reaching for it with both hands, the roar of free fall whistling in my ears. I gave half of my life to a cult, but this is by far the stupidest thing I have ever done.
I hadn’t planned on dying today. But I guess no one ever does.