10. Hell Is Other People （driving Around in All Their Cars） #4
“I do.” And I did. For example, I knew better than to get my hopes up. But even Dan thought getting in with the de Witts and Ara was worthwhile, and if not, I still had Teddy—
Oh, fuck, Teddy! I reached for my phone to send him a message, but of course I didn’t have it. I swayed a little, aware that I was in no condition to drive.
“I’m just going to get my phone,” I told Emmanuelle, shouting it over the sounds of someone discovering the speaker system. Someone had put on Kate Bush. “Have to cancel something.”
“What is it? I’ll get Edward to do it,” she said, already typing. “What do you need?”
“No, no, I should tell him myself—”
I turned and walked directly into someone, reeling back with a sharp gasp when their drink splashed all over the front of my clothes. “Oh, balls—”
“I’m so sorry,” said William de Witt. He seemed authentically distressed, his brow knitting with quiet worry as he apologized again, his voice low and hardly audible beneath Kate Bush’s deal with God.
His eyes were somewhere south of mine, perhaps checking to make sure I hadn’t been swept off my feet, possibly noticing the spreading stain of what looked like reddish black sludge on my jeans, whatever had been in his glass moments before.
It didn’t smell like alcohol—more like tea, or possibly kombucha.
It had that same fermented smell, the edge of a chemical reaction.
I thought vaguely about how nothing at the villa ever smelled as I expected it to, either saccharine or antiseptic.
A throbbing pungency to obscure the ordinariness of life, like scrubbing it out with bleach.
The thought left me, unfinished, almost as soon as it occurred. There was a long pulse of time, a hollow ringing in my ears, before William’s gaze finally slid up to meet mine.
“There you are,” he said. The music had cut out and his voice was gravelly, intimate, his hair ever so slightly askew, a lock of it spilling onto his forehead. The drunk woman with the tattoo was nowhere to be seen. Don’t lie down, I thought in her direction. That’s how the spins get you.
“Here I am.” I swallowed, aware of the sweat glistening on my chest, the metallic smell of spilled tea or whatever it was emulsifying with pineapple and a hint of weed.
I’d been unprepared for frivolities, so I’d worn an unremarkable cropped tank top with my favorite jeans, though like every time I’d worn anything to this house, they were in terrible condition now, drenched and in great danger of staying plastered to me forever.
I’d only just washed them that morning, which I hadn’t been happy about.
Now that freshly starched denim was like a straitjacket for my thighs, parenthetical brackets for my hips.
“Let’s get you cleaned up.” William took my arm lightly, then left one hand hovering above the small of my back.
The proximity of him was staggering, or maybe that was the champagne.
A bit of both. I found myself with a slight wobble, stabilized by the heat of his torso, the hard plane of his stomach, the sharp dowels of his ribs.
God, he was thin. No wonder he looked fantastic on screen.
I thought again about macro diets, brown rice and tea, ten pounds courtesy of the camera.
He answered my lean by folding me in closer, the point of equilibrium shifting somewhere into the space that was neither his nor mine.
We reached the upper landing, the terrace of the main house, and he guided me inside, up the stairs.
The opposite direction from Jude’s bedroom.
The entryway to another bedroom, sparse, obviously professionally decorated, was open, the door swung wide to reveal a Spanish- style fireplace, another cathedral ceiling, skylights through which the moon shone down.
William detangled himself from me, taking the lead, while I stepped inside like crossing ethereally to another realm.
“Here.” He reached for me, a motion I didn’t understand at first, because it seemed only an indication that I was summoned, that I was wanted.
That I should move in closer, per the next step of a dance.
The light in his bedroom was softer, and now his skin looked less sallow, more warm.
“If you want to take them off, I can have Genesis clean them for you—”
The thought of Genesis’s opinion on this offer was enough to shake me back to cognizance. “No, I’ll be fine, really—”
“You sure?” He gestured to my shirt, which in this lighting I could see was drenched with reddish brown tint, like I’d punctured an artery. On my jeans, a speckled pattern had formed like terrazzo across my thighs.
“Oh, this is par for the course, really,” I joked. After all, it had only been a day since I’d worn them army-crawling across the roof.
“Is it?” He arched a brow. The singular thought formed in my head that William de Witt wanted me to take my pants off.
“I…” I don’t know what I thought would happen.
I was in his bedroom, in a daze. I was looking at his bed.
There were reading glasses perched atop a pile of scripts, a small stack of books on his nightstand.
I read the names Henry Miller, Thomas Hardy, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius.
Distantly, I saw an edge of fabric sticking out from the hamper—a handkerchief, maybe, like the one Emmanuelle had used, marked with a graying, mottled stain.
Like a growth of something, a white wall dappled warningly with mold.
“Here.” Perhaps recognizing my overall state of catatonia, William beckoned me into the en suite bathroom, plucking up a crisp white towel that had been laid like a lover’s glove across his sink.
He turned the faucet for hot water, testing with two fingers before moistening the towel and handing it to me.
“I’ll let you—” He gestured to me; as I accepted the towel from his hand, I felt the way his eyes traveled the shape of my hips.
“I’d better go back down. Fred’s been left unattended again, so—” William stopped, shaking his head.
“Never mind, the corporate stuff’s painfully banal.
I’m sure you’d rather be out there savoring your reckless youth. ”
A sharp desire to prove otherwise coursed idiotically through me. “I really admire your commitment to philanthropy,” I said, with a sense of having to effortfully move my tongue. “There aren’t enough patrons in the world. Too much hoarded wealth, not enough ethical responsibility.”
William laughed, not unkindly. I could feel myself radiating at him, answering his glow with my own. “Is that champagne socialism I detect, or are you just the product of your generation?”
“We’re running so low on counterculture,” I said with a girlish sigh, dabbing at the stain across my midriff.
I was almost certainly not going to accomplish any real cleaning, but that was on me for accepting help from a man who didn’t do his own housekeeping.
I doubted either of us ever intended to save the shirt.
“How am I supposed to prove my commitment to liberation?”
William ran a hand through his hair, a boyish gesture.
Until he let his hand fall, scraping the stubble lining the underside of his cheeks. His thumb incidentally brushed his lower lip, a gesture he must have performed on camera a thousand times.
And yet, somehow, it was no less effective for witnessing live. “You’re too young to be this cynical,” William said. His eyes never left mine.
“Am I? Seems to me the best time for cynicism,” I countered. I gave up on the stain, as presumably had he. “Imagine what dreadful company I’d be if I had any hope for the future.”
He laughed again. The room gave a little shrug, my vision tilting sideways. “Wise for your age.”
“Only fashionably. Plenty of recklessness in the reserves.”
Our eyes met unevenly, with the impermanence of accident. The magnetism of fate, or perhaps that was just what the script would say. Something like this:
His eyes meet hers as if he is seeing his future rearrange itself in real time.
William was hesitating, but lingering, just as it would happen in the film.
He stood so close to me that I could smell something on his breath—that same strange, rancid smell.
Like Emmanuelle and her rotten fruit. It bloomed in the air between us, the presence of something sickeningly sweet.
There was something else, I realized for the first time, clocking the precise nature of Emmanuelle’s personal cocktail.
There was a coppery tang in it, like blood.
He coughed and I jumped. “Sorry,” he said, raising a fist. “Renovation dust. Can’t quite shake it.”
There was something odd about his smile just then. It was fleeting, apologetic, different than he’d been a moment earlier, but that wasn’t it.
His teeth, I realized after a beat. He was known for not having the ubiquitous Hollywood veneers—his smile was, and had always been, noticeably unique.
But his teeth were stained, I observed. There was a gray, indeterminate sheen on them up close, lining the gaps and the edges of his gums like darkened outlines.
I thought, with all the vanity of someone who lived and died by what people could see: How could he miss that?
“Jude seems very taken with you,” he said suddenly. I blinked.
“Does he?” News to me.
William regarded me then with a look that was not quite amusement.
“You’ll be all right?” he asked eventually, perhaps noticing we’d both been woken from our trance.
Because of course it couldn’t go any further. Wouldn’t, that is.
“Of course. Thanks for this.” I held up the towel, marked now by a halo of rust.