V CJ
V
CJ
The coffee shop patio is buzzing with toned and tanned people chatting animatedly, sipping iced Americanos and matcha lattes, taking pregnant pauses before unloading a particularly chewy piece of gossip. The trees around the patio’s perimeter give a false sense of privacy but real shade, a prize on this scorchingly hot Los Angeles day.
It’s exactly the kind of place Stuart hates, so why he asked me to drive all the way out here to West Hollywood is beyond me.
When I arrive, squinting through my sunglasses, I find him reading a copy of Artforum . His salt-and-pepper hair is slicked back, and the top three buttons of his light-pink linen shirt, which have never been put to use, continue to lie at ease. He is thirty years older than everyone here, but Stuart would stand out anywhere.
“For me?” I ask, reaching for one of the coffees on the table and sliding into the bistro chair across from him. The warmth of the seat announces itself against the ridges of my micro-pleat pants.
“Well, despite all of my overtures, Hugh Grant still refuses to meet me, so yes.” Stuart’s British accent has diminished after fifty years in the States but not vanished.
“I’m lucky Hugh and I have the same coffee order.”
Stuart closes the magazine and places it on the table with flourish, the very same manner in which he does most things. “Nice to see you outside of your zip code.”
“I leave Eagle Rock! I went to that black box theater,” I say defensively.
“That was in Highland Park. Two months ago. With me .”
“Well, once production on Gatsby starts next week, I’ll be away constantly. Which I don’t feel great about.”
“By the way, I would’ve been happy to put a call in about that gig, and you know it. Kurtz is an old friend.”
I shake my head. We’ve been over this. So many times. “I have an agent. I don’t want your help with jobs.”
“Oh, yes, no one gets any favors in this town. It runs on pure talent and hard work,” Stuart says, dripping with sarcasm. “Plus, Kurtz really does owe me. I practically saved his life at Danceteria.”
“You really were the Forrest Gump of the ’80s, weren’t you?”
Stuart holds up his hand to stop me. “Please do not bring that movie up in front of me. You know how I feel about it.”
“You didn’t tell Kurtz though, right?”
“Tell Kurtz what?”
“That I’m your daughter?”
“I thought that would be up to you to tell him, if you want.” Stuart’s tone softens, and I feel the muscles in my neck and shoulders release. I always get tense—nervy—when we go down this road.
“Can I show you the sets?”
He leans in, and I open my phone, pulling up an album and scrolling. “This is Daisy’s drawing room: lots of glass. You know, beautiful but transparent.”
“Oh, that lace—the color. It’s good.”
“We dyed it.”
“Exquisite,” he says, a proud look on his face. “Makes me wish I was still directing movies so that I could hire you.”
“Like I’d ever let you.” I say this with the cadence of a joke, but it’s true. “Besides, if this goes well, you wouldn’t be able to afford me.”
“That’s exactly what I’m hoping for.”
“I just have to stay focused. Make the most of this,” I say, more for my own benefit than Stuart’s.
“Darling, no one would ever argue that you lack focus. Listen, Agnes is a good age for you to be doing this.” He leans in and looks at me sincerely, redirecting the conversation to where he knows my real fears lie. “Four is when you start to have memories that carry into adulthood. Now she’s going to get to see what else her mother is capable of.”
My phone, face down, buzzes. I look at the notifications decorating my lock screen, obscuring a recent photo of Agnes in unicorn face paint. I can’t believe it’s been four years since she was born. Five years since I lost my mom.
“Felgate Gets Green Light, Picks Up Pattinson’s Role in Gray Gatsby ,” the Variety headline reads. Underneath is Jack’s headshot photoshopped next to one of Robert Pattinson, who was set to be our Nick Carraway, the moral center of the story. Plenty of actors would tell you that Nick, the audience surrogate, is actually the better part than the titular role; Jack Felgate is apparently one of them.
My cheeks flush, and I put down my coffee.
Stuart peers at me curiously.
“There’s been a casting shake-up. The part of Nick Carraway will now be played by... Jack Felgate.”
Stuart raises his eyebrows so high they are practically in his hairline. “That’s the Jack you had the one-night stand with?”
I put my palm on my forehead. “Why did I tell you that?”
“Because sometimes, like your father, you drink too many margaritas.”
“I could’ve sworn I got that from my mom.”
“No, you get all of your good traits from her, and all the questionable ones come from me.”
In the years since we met, it feels like Jack has become omnipresent. The trades are constantly tracking his career moves, there are in-depth profiles about his rise as a Hollywood It Boy, and despite a minimal online presence, he is constantly going viral for the cardigan he’s wearing, the flowers he’s buying at a market in London, the book that’s peeking out of his back pocket. I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch anything else he’s been in—or even the entirety of Flames . Reckoning with the reality of my feelings about him—the way the memory of that night has refused to recede in my consciousness, the physical reaction I have to seeing photos of him—feels both terrifying and juvenile.
When I look at photos of him, I see the man with whom I briefly cast aside my responsibilities for a fling that felt improbably joyful and exhilarating at the time and even more so now. Everything about those last few months of my mother’s life is a blur, except for that night. To me, Jack represents a one-night-only taste of youthful exuberance before all of my experiences were cast in the shadow of grief. Ours was a connection at a time when I desperately needed one: a reprieve from the devastation I felt and the future loss I couldn’t even conceive of. Sometimes I wonder if there might have been something real between us, but then I remind myself that the intensity of my life during that period colored everything I experienced. Like the volume was turned up on every encounter, every interaction.
My cheeks warm, and not from the sun. There’s so much Jack brings up for me, and I don’t need to go there.
“Well, I’m glad you remember this story, but there’s no way Jack does,” I assure Stuart.
“You are exceedingly memorable,” Stuart says. “That you get from both your mother and me.”
“Momma, I need you.”
I open Agnes’s bedroom door, toothbrush in my mouth, to find her exactly as I left her minutes earlier.
I sit at the edge of her bed and smooth her hair. An unruly blond mop, a few shades lighter than mine, along with giant, unblinking brown eyes. Mine too.
“What is it, sweetie?”
“I woke up, and I didn’t know where you were.”
“You mean to tell me that in the last three minutes, you already fell asleep and woke back up?”
“I don’t know!”
“That means there’s still plenty of time for us to get lots and lots of sleep and be ready for school tomorrow.” I wrap one of her curls around my ring finger.
“And Uncle Stuart is going to take me and pick me up.”
“That’s right.” It isn’t a secret that Stuart is her grandfather, but something about the term “Grandpa” doesn’t feel quite right. “But I’ll be home for dinner. With the good pizza.” I realize I am making these assurances as much for myself as for her.
I kiss her on the temple and tuck her into the sheets that the costumer on my last job embroidered with her name—a special wrap gift for me. I gently close her door to force myself to bed as well.
I’m plagued by the “night before the first day of school” jitters that starting a movie always gives me. Much of the work has already been done in preproduction; the sets designed and mostly constructed, props selected. But still my heart ping-pongs knowing how impossible it is to gauge how any of it will look until the director begins shooting. Other films I’ve been on, I didn’t need to show up every day, but this one is different. This is my biggest budget, my biggest departments, my biggest swing. Also the most time I’ll have spent away from Agnes for work. If all goes well, this movie will be my calling card, and if it doesn’t, the guilt I’m already wracked with will be double.
Tossing and turning, I look over at the clock: 11p.m.
I reach for my phone on my nightstand and do something I don’t ever allow myself to do: google Jack.
There he is, in a picture posted by E! News on Instagram, dressed sharply in a dark-blue suit, on the red carpet of the People’s Choice Awards. He stands taller now than he did when I met him, but his smile is the same: conspiratorial. I slide my finger through the images and see that while they did not walk the red carpet together, Jack was seen at multiple after-parties canoodling with his Flames Flicker Eternal costar Ginny Friedrich. The rumor mill has been churning about their relationship ever since they first appeared together on-screen. Neither has confirmed the nature of their relationship to the press, but based on how regularly they are spotted together, it is safe to assume that they’ve been happily coupled up for some time now. That this remains the case is a strange comfort to me. It means there’s nothing from me to mull, consider, long for, what-if. I turn my screen to black and close my eyes.