Chapter 3
I spend the afternoon with Juniper, answering the same questions: What’s it like to work with Matthew?
How did you and Juniper achieve such incredible chemistry?
How did you research the part? How well do you know Juniper?
Is there anything our readers should know about your relationship?
Juniper, you’ve been so open about your history of abuse and how it has shaped you; what would you say to young people living in similar situations?
This last question Juniper always answers brilliantly, and each time it’s like she’s never said the words before, as if she is only now thinking of them.
“Your first obligation is to survive. As a kid, I felt so powerless and so scared all the time, and I’m sorry for anyone who feels that way now.
But your first obligation is to survive if you can, to make it to the other shore. ”
I like this answer because it doesn’t pretend that there’s some easy solution, that trauma is something you get over or move past. It’s just something you live with. But your first obligation is to survive.
When my mom and dad finally found out, my mom said, “Why didn’t you say something sooner?” The truth is, I told them the moment I could, the moment it became possible. Before that, the words strangled me.
_____
We make it through the afternoon. Matthew is on Entertainment Tonight, so Juniper and I make a date to watch together.
Then she wants me to go to her friend Ophelia’s birthday party.
But before all that, I go back to my room and lie down on top of the covers and stare at the ceiling for a while.
I scroll through Instagram, post some pictures of the day, and drink a beer out of the minibar.
I decide to go for a walk, but people keep recognizing me, even though I have a ball cap on, because the movie is getting a lot of attention, so I go back to the hotel and have a drink at the bar alone, watching a baseball game.
Finally, Juniper texts me to come over for some room service dinner, so I make my way to her suite, which for some reason has a grand piano in one of its two sitting rooms.
“Today was exhausting,” I say.
“Oh, yeah, pretending to look upon you with fondness for nine straight hours? The horror.”
I laugh. “Last year, I could barely make rent, and I still find a way to complain about my life.”
“It does get old,” she acknowledges.
“Well, your first obligation is to survive,” I say.
“Working with Matthew was a literal dream come true,” she says.
“My favorite animal is the rhinoceros that escaped from the Prague Zoo.”
“Kai’s favorite color is the yellow of falling ginkgo leaves.” She plops herself down on one of the living room’s several chairs. “Anyway, problems of privilege are still problems.”
“What do you want for dinner? I’ll call it down.”
_____
I’m eating a cheeseburger and Juniper a salad when Matthew comes on-screen. He’s wearing a black suit, two buttons open on his purple shirt, smiling. It’s strange to think that I know him, that this man on television is also a man who plays motorcycle racing games and can’t quit smoking.
“How are you?” asks the host and Matthew says, “I’m well. I’m well,” and then they talk about Warhol and transforming oneself for the role and how Matthew lost thirty pounds in thirty days and all that stuff, and then out of nowhere the host says, “Matthew Malone, what happens to us after we die?”
“I know that love is stronger than death,” Matthew says. “My father died almost ten years ago, but as long as I am alive, he will be my father, and I will be his son.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” the host says.
“My old man, what a guy,” Matthew says. “In all our years together, he only told me he was proud of me once, when they named the oncology wing of Children’s LA after me.”
“Well, you’ve made a hell of a movie, Matthew, even if your dad wouldn’t say as much.”
“I wish he could’ve seen this one,” Matthew says. “The kids in it are great. Juniper Castillo and Kai Laramie,” he says. Juniper and I start pushing each other in excitement. “When you’ve been in this business as long as I have, you know the special ones. And those kids are special.”
Ellen is calling me. Katie is calling Juniper. We answer. “Holy shit he said your name on network television,” Ellen says. “God, he’s class. That shit about love being stronger than death? We’re gonna push the hell out of that. That’s the kind of theology even atheists can get behind.”
“Yeah, Juniper and I are watching together.”
“Just make out already,” Ellen says.
“Can’t. She’s married to the sea.”
_____
After our calls, Juniper and I flip through channels until we come across an action comedy Matthew made with Kevin Hart.
Juniper’s analyzing the movie—she can tell what lines were recorded later in voice-over sessions, when the director wanted a long two-shot but had to cut away because something wasn’t right in the performances, and so on—and I love listening to her, seeing her mind interact with a movie, even a bad one.
Maybe especially a bad one. When we watch good movies, we’re silent, just taking it in, but the bad ones are easier to laugh at and learn from.
In bad movies, you can see the strings of the puppets better, understand the actors’ choices and how, in combination with the camera and the sets, they try to create the illusion that this all might be real, or real enough anyway to bring forth genuine feeling.
We lie in bed watching this not-great movie for a while, and I think about the absurdity of having never kissed Juniper in real life, and how much Ellen and Katie and the rest of the machine would like me to kiss Juniper, and how that makes me not want to kiss her.
I actually do want to kiss her, I think—but I know that kissing would lead to all kinds of other things, including, potentially, me throwing up in the bathroom while having a panic attack.
I think about how it’s harder to say I love you to Juniper now than when we first met.
“Matthew must’ve known this would be a terrible film,” she says. “He couldn’t have been tricked by the script, you know?”
“Maybe he just loves his costar. Why do you think I’m doing Gods of Andromeda?”
“Because of the money?”
“Well, and I get a free personal trainer.”
“Plus you get to wear gold armor.”
“And that hot girl’s in it.”
“Which hot girl?”
“The one who plays your sister.”
Juniper laughs. “That’s actually a good bit of repartee for the junket, if you want to really play up the possibilities. Romances need Obstacles.”
“Nah,” I say. “Even joking ‘I find the girl who plays her sister hot’ is a bad Obstacle.”
Juniper is quiet for a minute, then we go back to watching the movie, laughing both with it and at it. Out of nowhere she says, “What is our Obstacle?”
“Um,” I say.
“I mean, you could like me, right?”
“In fact, I do like you very much.”
“So you could kiss me.”
“And you could kiss me.”
She is looking at me now, and I realize I know she’s looking at me because I am looking at her. Never shy of eye contact, that Juniper Castillo, and what eyes they are—a deep, enveloping brown. “I could,” she says again.
I flinch. “The thing is,” I say, “you can’t unkiss someone. You can’t go back to before you knew what that person’s kiss felt like.”
“You already know what it feels like to kiss me,” she says.
“My character knows what it feels like to kiss your character in front of two cameras, a boom mic, and a bunch of people. That’s different.”
She’s silent for a while, then finally nods and says, “We should go to that party.”
_____
And so we do. It’s after eleven by the time we get to Brooklyn.
The party is in a third-floor apartment and everyone there is young and attractive.
A girl with big, curly hair asks me if I want to go into Ophelia’s bedroom to do drugs, and I say Which drugs, and she says Probably cocaine if I know Ophelia, and I say I think I’m okay.
Juniper knows everyone and I don’t know anybody so I get a plastic glass and pour myself some of the wine that’s in the kitchen.
A girl asks me if I know how to make a martini and I tell her that I do, so I make her a martini and then Juniper appears and kisses me on the cheek and says, Isn’t Ophelia hilarious?
I haven’t actually met Ophelia yet, but I smile and say, Yes, and then for a while I talk to a handsome young guy who is filming a movie where he’s the lone survivor of a plane crash.
We talk about how the wine is warm, and the guy seems really sweet, like the kind of person who’s interested in acting as acting not as a vehicle to celebrity, and then his girlfriend comes up and he introduces her as a director, and she says, Mostly of commercials, and I say that commercials need directors, too, and she says, You make it sound like commercials are orphans, which makes me think about how all of us are sort of orphans, just of the ostensibly adult variety, trying to figure out how to make martinis and friends and art together.
The party is really fun, and I like being there and then Jaya Hudson-Rowe shows up and hugs me, saying, It’s the boy who loves me.
Everyone tries to be cool around her, but it’s Jaya, and I think about how much work it must be to be Jaya Hudson-Rowe all the time, even at Ophelia’s party, and how she must’ve enjoyed spending an evening with me drinking martinis if only because I had no idea who she was.
Jaya’s new girlfriend is there with her and she tells me she’s already seen the movie because she works at a studio and that I’m incredible in it and I say thanks and by the time I actually figure out who Ophelia is, it’s only because someone brings out a little handmade cake with candles on it, twenty-two candles, and I keep thinking we are all so young.
Our joints are still good. Whatever has begun to harden in us is still soft in that apartment.