Chapter 22
“I don’t remember ever being this angry,” Will said. Patrick was perched on the armchair in Will’s living room, watching him pace back and forth with a glass of red wine and listening as he recounted what happened to him and Faye after the story hour. “I could throttle them. Set them on fire. Walk them over a thousand upturned plugs.”
“I’m so sorry.” Patrick didn’t know what else to say. He had come to Will’s straight from the set, excited to finally see him after spending all day so distracted it had taken him multiple takes to deliver a single line. But his hopes for the evening had evaporated when Will opened the door, eyes wide with hurt and fury, and Patrick had pulled him into a hug before even thinking to ask what had happened. And now he sat listening, frustratingly helpless. His instinct when a friend was hurting would usually be to leap into solutions-offering mode, but what was the solution here? Fix structural, systemic homophobia single-handedly?
“It’s just so dumb,” Will continued, gesticulating with his glass so hard he nearly stained the carpet crimson. “The whole homophobia thing. Just utterly stupid. It makes no sense. Hating us, attacking us when we’ve done nothing, deciding that we’re what’s wrong with society, that we’re the threat to children. All because what? Some absolute wally mistranslated a Bible passage into Greek and fucked us all over. Threw us in jail. Chemically castrated us. Forced us to justify our existence, to beg and scrape for the barest human dignity.” He turned to Patrick. “And you still can’t tell the world you sleep with men in case you lose your job.”
“That’s not exactly how I would probably put it,” said Patrick, but Will had already resumed his brisk, furious laps of the living room.
“Because heaven forbid the world find out their favorite superhero is a fag.”
Patrick wrinkled his nose. “I hate that word.”
“Oh, grow up.” Will rolled his eyes. “We’re post–reclamation of hate speech now, darling. It’s practically a term of endearment.”
“Sorry I’m not as with it as you,” said Patrick, edgy now, and Will paused momentarily, casting him a contrite look.
“Sorry. It’s not your fault.”
“It’s OK. You’re upset. I hate that you’re upset.”
“I shouldn’t have taken it out on you. I can be such a gobshite sometimes.”
“Excuse me?”
“A gobshite. It means…ugh, never mind.” He looked down into his wine, then added: “Faye lost most of her friends, you know.”
“She did?” Patrick didn’t ask how, or when. Didn’t need to.
“Yeah. Saw the world turn against her and everyone she knew. Weathered that. Survived that, somehow. Lived long enough to be bestowed with a fraction of the respect she is owed, by us, if not the rest of the world. And to be treated so…” His pacing faltered. “I’ve never seen her like that, Patrick. She looked so…old.”
“What can I do?” Patrick asked.
Will looked at Patrick, and Patrick knew he’d asked the wrong question. There was only one thing he could do, he knew: one thing in his power to effect any kind of change, to move the needle even a fraction of an inch.
Come out. Talk about his personal life. Risk tanking his career and inviting hordes of those same protestors onto his own front lawn.
“There is something,” said Will, “that might make me feel better.”
“What is it?” Please don’t ask me to do that, he thought. Anything but that.
“Right. Don’t judge me…” Will said, pausing in front of the coffee table where his laptop lay. He set down his wine, opened the computer, and started typing.
Thank god, it’s a sex thing, Patrick thought. He leaned forward in his seat to get a better look, prepared to indulge Will in whatever pornographic fantasy he liked. But when Will swiveled the screen around to show him what he had looked up, Patrick was confronted with a streaming site’s loading screen for an early 2010s slasher entitled Pledge Week: New Blood. The Photoshop rush job of a poster showed several up-and-coming actors from that time, including one baby-faced Patrick Lake, superimposed over the front door of a fraternity house.
“They’re dying to get in,” intoned Will gravely, echoing the movie’s tagline.
“What’s happening right now?” Patrick asked, aghast. “Where did you find this?”
“Again, I say, don’t judge me.” Will took a gulp of red. “But I’ve sort of been watching your back catalog.”
“You what?”
Will gasped and pointed at him. “Oh my god. Did you hear yourself? You sounded so English just then!” He screamed with laughter, so clearly the wine was taking effect. “You what, mate?”
“You’ve been watching my movies?” Patrick continued, ignoring him.
“Yeah. It’s probably silly. I just…” Will shrugged. “It felt like another way of getting to know you.”
“That is…”
“Creepy? It’s a bit creepy, innit. I knew it was creepy. April told me it was creepy.”
“I was about to say adorable. But then, I have been out of the scene for a long time, as we’ve already established, so maybe it is creepy and I just don’t know it.”
“So…?” Will nudged the laptop forward.
“I don’t know,” said Patrick. “I kinda hate watching myself.”
“And I hate scary movies,” said Will. “So this will be horrible for both of us.”
“This is what will make you feel better?”
“I just need to stop thinking about those egg-throwing bastards for a little while and turn my brain off with something mindless.”
“Mindless!” Patrick feigned offense. “That’s my oeuvre, I’ll have you know.”
“I’ve seen your oeuvre,” Will said, winking. “It’s fuzzier.”
He scooted around the coffee table and sank onto the sofa, threw a blanket over his lap, then held up one end of the blanket and patted the sofa cushion next to him. Patrick made some light protesting noises before rising from his armchair and moving over to the couch. Will curled into him as Patrick raised his arm to make room in near synchronicity. There was something about this automatic motion on both their parts that Patrick found deeply pleasing.
“Now if there are any bits that get too tense or gory…” Will began.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll protect you.”
“I was going to say, we can just turn it off. As long as we make it past the first third. I want to see all of your scenes, and your character gets killed off at the start of the second act.”
“How do you know that?”
“Seriously? Am I going to watch a horror film without having read the plot summary on Wikipedia first? Like some kind of madman?”
“Fine,” said Patrick as Will hit play, then nestled deeper into the crook of his shoulder. “Just be warned…I look kinda different in this.”
“Oh, I know. I googled some stills. You are fully in your twink era. You look so cute. Proper murderable.”
“Flatterer.” Patrick kissed the top of Will’s head. Barely minutes later, after only one disappointingly bloodless kill (the studio had been keen for a PG-13 rating, which all but killed the movie), he felt Will’s breathing slow and deepen. He smirked. He couldn’t wait to rub it in his face after that whole nodding-off-in-the-car thing.
“Are you asleep?” he whispered.
“No,” Will retorted, eyes closed. “I am gripped. This is a real filmé.”
“If you like, we can switch this off, and I can just read the Wikipedia plot summary to you,” offered Patrick.
“Like a bedtime story?”
“A really fucked-up bedtime story.”
Will yawned. “You’re so good to me,” he mumbled. “Best boyfriend ever.”
Something in Patrick’s chest expanded on Will’s use of that word.
“Come on, you,” he said, rubbing Will’s shoulder to rouse him. “Let’s go to bed.”
Audra Kelly lay in Patrick’s arms, held so close to him that he could feel her heartbeat, and told him: “I think I love you after all.”
“You said you had no time for love,” he replied. “That there were other, more important things.”
“That was before,” she said, placing her hand on his chest, feeling his own heart. “Before you.”
Patrick pressed his forehead against hers, felt her breath on his skin, and kissed her. How strange, he thought, that her mouth should be so much softer than Will’s, with none of its strength: She did not push back but gently caressed his lips with her own.
“I never thought I would have this,” she said. “I am so glad. That I lived long enough to meet someone like you.”
“Don’t talk like that. You’re going to be fine.”
“You are a terrible liar.” Audra’s breath fluttered weakly. “Looks like I was right, flyboy. I’m going to die for my planet after all.
“I am not afraid, and nor should you be,” she continued. “When a Zalian’s body perishes, their essence lives on. We ascend to a higher plane of existence. A resplendent, perfect dimension. Oh…no tears now. Please. Or at least let them be tears of joy. How lucky we have been, that the cosmos brought us together. That of all worlds, you crash-landed on mine. What perfect design! What fate!” She stroked his face with a shaking hand. “What kismet.”
Patrick whimpered in grief, his chest heaving, and then…nothing.
“Shit,” he muttered. “Sorry.”
“Cut!” yelled Lucas Grant, throwing up his hands in exasperation. “Patrick, what is so hard about this? Why. Are you not. Fucking crying? Your alien girlfriend is dying in your arms and you look like you’re thinking about what to have for dinner. You told me you’d got this.”
“I’m sorry,” said Patrick. “I really thought I did.”
“It’s fine,” the director said, in a way that let Patrick know it was most definitely not fine. “I’m pushing for maximum cinéma vérité here, but whatever. Everybody, take five! Then, when we’re back, we’ll use the goddamn menthol, I guess.”
Audra jumped to her feet, and a runner materialized to hand them both bottles of water while the crew redressed the set, which was to say returned various tennis balls on sticks to their original positions.
“Don’t worry,” she told Patrick between delicate sips. “You’ll get it next time.”
“Cinéma vérité.” Patrick rolled his eyes, realizing as he’d done so that it was with more than a touch of the urbane sass he had come to associate with Will. “We’re filming against a green screen on a soundstage in Birmingham, and your character has just been shot by a flying lizard carrying a laser rifle.”
“In the canon of tragic heroine deaths, it’s not exactly Ophelian,” Audra agreed.
A small cadre of makeup artists descended to fuss over her, touching up her eyes and lips, ensuring that none of her purple skin tone had rubbed off during the last take, that the spatter of fake indigo blood across one cheek had not smudged, thereby posing a threat to continuity.
“I look pretty good for a dead bitch,” she remarked upon being shown her own reflection in a hand mirror.
“Your turn, Captain Handsome,” said Estelle, the chief makeup artist, lightly gripping Patrick’s chin and turning his head first this way and then that, inspecting her handiwork. “Huh,” she muttered to herself.
“Huh?” Patrick, head still tilted back in her grasp, raised an eyebrow.
“Nothing,” she said. “You just need some more powder, is all. This way.”
She marched off in the direction of her station, and Patrick obligingly followed, lowering himself into the makeup chair and seeing for the first time what Estelle saw: a mild stubble rash on his nose and chin that looked bright red under the unforgiving lights. Estelle covered it up quickly and easily enough, patting him on the shoulder when he was good to go, and Patrick was painfully grateful for her discretion.
“Two minutes!” yelled the AD. “Places, people!”
Patrick and Audra reconvened on the soundstage, somebody waved a vapor stick under his eyes, Lucas Grant called “Action!” and Captain Kismet wept for his lost princess.
“Can you really not cry on cue, though?” Audra asked him later, sitting next to him on the sofa in her room, bare feet draped over his legs.
“I don’t know what it is!” said Patrick. “I think of every sad thing I can: poverty, famine…”
“Those uggos who get made over on Queer Eye and realize they have value as people!” Audra interjected with an earnest gasp.
“Sure, that, too. And I can feel the tears coming. But then something just gets in the way. They never make it out. It’s like I’m, I don’t know, emotionally constipated or something.”
“I have a guy for that,” said Audra. “For five hundred dollars he’ll make you a green juice that flushes out your entire insides, and then he does energy healing on you while you drink it, so you end up shitting out all your bad vibes, too. It’s very cathartic. Want me to give him a call? See if he’s free to fly out?”
“Let’s call that a good backup plan,” said Patrick. “I think I’ll just go with the menthol stick for now.”
“As you wish.” Audra shrugged. “It’s your energy.”
“I appreciate it, though,” he added, realizing that all this talk of vibes and pooping was Audra’s own LA way of trying to be sweet.
“Does that work for you?” he asked. “Is that how you’re able to cry whenever you want?”
“Do I shit so hard that I start sobbing?” Audra looked at him like he was insane. “Do you have any idea what an awful thing that is to say to a woman?”
“What? No, I just meant…” Patrick felt the ground of the conversation giving way beneath him. “Because you said…”
“I can’t believe you would ask me something like that,” Audra continued, her face crumpling like tissue paper. “I am a lady, Patrick. Why do you want me to feel bad about myself? Do you have any idea how hard it is to be a woman in this industry? The obsession with our bodies? Like we’re public property. And you just go asking me about my butthole?” She burst into tears, and in an instant her face was soaked, her cheeks flush and smeared with tears. “God, you must think I’m really disgusting,” she bawled, wiping away snot with the back of her hand.
“Jesus,” said Hector from the doorway. “Did you break Audra?”
“I didn’t mean to!” protested Patrick. “I just…there was this vapor stick, and energy juice, and Audra was telling me about her body, and—”
Hector grinned wolfishly, and Patrick realized Audra’s sobs weren’t actually sobs. She was cackling. He turned to her, stunned, to see her face transformed once more, smiling sweetly through the oil spill of her mascara.
“And that,” she said, daintily dabbing at her eyes, “is how you cry on command.”
“You are a sociopath,” said Patrick.
“I am an actress.”
“It’s one hell of a party trick,” said Hector. “The first time she did it to me I was horrified. I thought I was gonna be hearing from her lawyer.”
“She’s done it to you, too?”
“And half the crew.”
“It’s a power thing,” she said. “You would not believe how much easier it is to get things done just because men never want to think they’ve made a pretty girl cry.”
“Sociopath,” Patrick repeated.
“I’m not proud of it,” she added.
“Really? Because it sounds like you kind of are.”
“Oh, she is,” said Hector.
“Since when have you two been spending that much time together?” asked Patrick.
Audra shrugged. “Since you never seem to be around for me to tease anymore, and my self-esteem is like a quantum physics experiment. I need a handsome man around at all times to observe me being beautiful, or I cease to exist.”
“Schr?dinger’s hottie,” said Hector, looking as pleased as punch.
“Oh.” Patrick looked from Hector to Audra. “Oh.”
“Hector came looking for you one afternoon, and you were nowhere to be found,” Audra said, “and I was bored, so I bet him he couldn’t lift me.” Hector flexed a bicep as if to illustrate the story. “Turns out he can. Hector, show him.”
Springing into action like a show dog, Hector scooped Audra up and threw her over his shoulder while she squealed in delight.
“See?” she giggled, tapping Hector’s back until he spun her around so she could face Patrick. “See?”
“I do,” Patrick said, forcing a smile. He saw, all right. Boy meets girl, boy physically lifts girl. He didn’t want to resent Audra or Hector. He liked them both. But he couldn’t get it out of his head how neither of them thought twice about their display of affection. He hated that it was the kind of thing he wouldn’t have even noticed, at least not consciously, until very recently.
“How long has this been going on?” he asked.
Hector shrugged. “Just a few weeks.”
“I didn’t know.”
Audra peered down at him from her perch. “Well, you are a little self-absorbed.”
“Did you tell him yet?” asked Hector.
“Not yet,” she said. “Now put me down, I’m getting dizzy.” Hector obeyed, and after Audra had fixed her barely mussed hair, she informed Patrick that the cast were having a little shindig.
“Everyone is sick of these endless reshoots and rewrites and needs to blow off a little steam,” she said. “So we’re doing karaoke in my suite tomorrow night to celebrate this hell nearly being over. BYOB: bring your own bangers.”
“I don’t know,” said Patrick, remembering what had happened the last time Audra convinced him he needed to let his hair down. “I’m not really a karaoke kind of guy.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Just do some Bon Jovi or Bruce Springsteen. You’ll have fun.” She paused, then added: “And if you wanted to invite somebody, that would be fine, too.”
“Invite somebody?”
Audra glanced sideways at Hector, and Patrick was thrown back in time to the apartment where he grew up. It was the same look his parents would exchange when they had clearly been talking about him when he wasn’t in the room.
“You’ve seemed very…preoccupied lately,” said Hector. “Going off on your own. Sometimes you’re not here in the mornings. We just figured that maybe you’d, you know…”
“We figured you were getting laid,” said Audra. “And if you wanted to bring them to karaoke night, it could be fun!” She placed a hand on her hip. “I promise I won’t even tell them about how you just made me cry.”
“That’s sweet of you,” said Patrick, “but—”
“I insist, actually!” said Audra. “Come on, Patrick. We’ve been on a closed set for weeks. I love these people, but at this point the pool is so small we’re becoming conversationally inbred. We need new blood. Please. Bring them.”
This was the third time she had used “them.” Which could just be a turn of phrase, but what if it wasn’t? Audra could be remarkably perceptive on the rare occasions when she turned her gaze outward. She’d clocked that Estelle was pregnant before Estelle told anyone simply because the makeup artist had changed her morning coffee order.
“I know you value your privacy,” Audra said, gentle but still pushy, “and you should. The vultures are always circling. But who gets that better than us? Who else can you trust to be discreet?”
She knew. She had to. God, Patrick felt so naive. This was the woman he’d danced with in a gay bar. Who must have noticed that he started disappearing off someplace almost immediately after that night. She wasn’t stupid. She never had been.
“I…” he said, but he choked on whatever he had been about to say next, his face hot, throat thick.
“It’s OK, buddy,” said Hector, sitting down beside him, but the impulse to cry was already subsiding, as it always did. Years of practice.
He had become so scared of what might happen if he acted on his feelings, he had not thought any further than that. Had not even realized he wanted this: to bring Will into his life, to share him with others. To introduce his date to his friends, like other people did.
Patrick felt Audra take a seat on his other side and lean her head on his shoulder.
“Bring him,” she whispered. “Or I will cry again.”