Day 1
There’s a phenomenon I’ve experienced after a film comes out that I call The Comedown.
It happens with good movies and bad ones, and even with TV shows that run on Nickelodeon for six years.
One day you’re working, rolling some ball of art ceaselessly uphill, and then you wake up the next day and it’s just… over.
After Kai fails to show up to the premiere’s afterparty or respond to my late-night my-place-or-yours text, I call him that next morning, but it goes straight to voicemail.
I figure he’s still asleep. “Good morning. Call me when you charge your phone and get this. I love you.” Then I call my agent, Jamie.
“Juniper, my love, how are you?”
“How’s the movie tracking?”
“We’re still hoping for a twenty-plus opening weekend. We’ll know more tomorrow night once we get some actual butts in actual seats. You feeling good?”
“Sure,” I say. “What should I be doing today? Posting? I’ve got a carousel I could post of Kai and me, or I could do a live, or—”
“Definitely post stuff from the premiere, Junie, but you need to chill a little. You did it. Take a week off.”
“I don’t need a week off. I need the movie to be a hit.”
“It already is; have you read these reviews? There’s gonna be plenty to do. A whole awards push probably. But for now, the train has left the station. Work on Andromeda if you need to work.”
“Got it,” I tell her.
“I’ll call you tomorrow with more.”
“Sure. Thanks, Jamie.”
_____
I don’t start worrying about Kai until around ten thirty a.m. I call him again.
Straight to voicemail. I don’t want to be That Girl, so I tell myself he’s fine and just sleeping in.
I go for a run in the hotel’s gym. I prefer running around Central Park, and we’re right around the corner from it, but I don’t want to get recognized, especially when exercising, because I have a goofy running gait.
So I put on a hat and some workout clothes and run on the treadmill, and then Katie calls me and tells me my flight to LA leaves at eight p.m. but she has gotten me a late checkout so no rush.
I ask her what I need to do to promote the movie, and she says, “Christ, Juniper. You did it. Once the movie is in the present tense for the audience, it’s in the past tense for us.
Now it’s all about advertising and the studio’s marketing team.
You junketed the living hell out of that movie. Take a nap.”
I call Kai again, and then finally I check in with Ellen.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey, is Kai with you?” Ellen asks.
“No, I was hoping he was with you.”
“He’s not answering his phone.”
“Straight to voicemail.”
“Okay, I’m officially Slightly Concerned,” Ellen says. “Let me have the hotel check on him. Probably just a bad hangover combined with low battery.”
While I wait for her to call back, I post that carousel of Kai and me on Instagram—pictures of us throughout the junket, culminating with us together on the red carpet, me laughing with his arm around me. Caption: I love you, Kai Laramie. And I can’t wait for the world to see why.
Ellen calls back as I’m reading the first comments. “So all his stuff is still there. Doesn’t look like he slept there last night; the bed is still made. I’m officially Moderately Concerned.”
“Fuck,” I say.
“I’ll call the studio,” she says.
_____
Kai disappearing feels precisely like when my mom would disappear.
The same all-over bodily fear. The same resentment and frustration.
The same awareness that however much they love you, they love whatever they abandon you for more.
I’ve had that enough from a mother not to want it from a boyfriend.
As a kid, I yearned for a normal life, one where your mom wakes up before you do and makes you breakfast and takes you to school.
Instead, I was always chasing her around.
She’d go out one night and just not come home, and then I’d call and call until eventually she’d answer and I’d figure out how to get her home, even when I was eleven or twelve.
She’d come back smelling like whiskey and cigarettes and tell me she’d met a producer who was going to make us a star or whatever.
But, of course, every time there was a possibility that something worse had happened. Something dangerous. Something fatal. That was always a worry with my mother, and now that is a worry with Kai.
To distract myself, I keep scrolling through Instagram, searching for Kai’s name, hoping he’ll post or someone will post about him, that he’ll show up hungover in some paparazzi picture. I’ve been doing that for a while when I get a call from a 310 number I don’t recognize.
“Hello?”
“Hey, it’s Todd, with the studio,” he says. “I need you to come to the New York office if you don’t mind. There’s a car waiting for you outside.”
“Is everything okay?”
“We’ll talk about it shortly.” He hangs up.
_____
As the car fights its way down Seventh Avenue, I can’t get air into my lungs.
I think about how Kai seemed yesterday. He was out of it, but that’s to be expected at a premiere, where everything is happening all at once.
He was shy around my friends. He was pissed about Matthew’s betrayal, but not so much that he abandoned the premiere.
I imagine him hurt. I imagine him dead. I imagine how I will hug him when I see him. If I see him.
I’m dropped off at a skyscraper in lower Manhattan, where a security guard personally escorts me up to the seventeenth floor and into Todd’s corner office with a view of the Statue of Liberty.
I sit down on a plush couch and resist the urge to speak first. Todd stands up and walks to a little bar atop a side table. “Drink?” he asks.
I shake my head.
“Well, I’m having one.” He pours a scotch and toasts in my direction.
“So we tracked Kai’s phone to JFK, where he dumped it in a trash can.
But we can tell from his credit card charges that he took an early morning flight to Jamaica and booked a beach hut at a resort called GoldenEye. That’s all my guys know.”
“Your guys?”
“This sort of thing happens more than you might expect with actors,” he says.
“Not everyone is a pro like you, Juniper. Some of them are…well, artistes. I’m afraid Kai may be an artiste.
Problem is, he’s also a damn good actor and we need him to be in Vancouver in two weeks prepping for Gods of Andromeda. ”
“Right, of course,” I say.
“I think we’ll have to recast the movie if he bows out.”
“Yes, I understand he’d have to be replaced.”
“The two of you are a package, Juniper. The story is, two talented kids stick together for a big tentpole movie. Without both of you, that story falls apart. You’re brilliant, but I think realistically we’d have to recast both roles.”
“You’re telling me that if Kai doesn’t come back, you’re firing me from Gods of Andromeda?”
“Firing is a strong word, kid. Recasting.”
“You’re gonna fire me because some boy skittered off to Jamaica?” I am not only mad at Todd. I am also mad at Kai.
He pauses for a moment, sits down, and puts his feet up on his desk. He’s wearing black lace-up boots. “Yeah,” he says. “I’d have to. But I think we can still save this thing.”
“And how do you propose we do that?”
“I’ve got you on a flight to Jamaica first thing tomorrow,” he says. “You’ll be swimming in the ocean by noon. All expenses paid.”
“Because you think I’m the only one who can bring him home.”
Todd takes a long breath. “Yeah,” he says. “Because I think you’re the only one who can bring him home.”
_____
When we started Andy Warhol Never Gets Old, I was the star.
I mean, Matthew was the star, but I was the starlet, the one with boundless potential, the one who might just be the Next New Thing.
But instead, Kai has taken on that role—in part because of his inexperience, his lack of polish.
Of course, that’s also part of why I fell in love with him.
He is so goddamned charming, and so dreamily unaware of his charm.
“So I show up for every shoot on time. Every interview on time. I’m the consummate professional.
And you fire me because he isn’t professional.
Have you ever noticed, Todd, that it’s always the men who get to be, as you call them, artistes?
Have you ever noticed that women don’t get that luxury?
” I’m staring at Todd’s boot soles, which are closer to me than any other part of him.
“I know you think I make the rules,” Todd replies.
“But I got into this business to make great movies, and now I’m stuck being The Man.
I don’t make the rules any more than you do.
There’s a Man behind me, and one behind him, like Russian nesting dolls only they get bigger and bigger until you get to the shareholders, and all that matters to them is the stock going up. It’s the market you’re mad at.”
“Nobody wants to own up to their own power, Todd. It’s inconvenient. I’ll go to Jamaica. I’ll bring Kai back. And you’ll remember that I went on an errand for you the next time I need a favor. You’ll remember that I—unlike most people in this fucking industry—can be counted upon.”
“I like your spark, kid.”
“Yeah,” I say.
_____
I call Jamie and tell her she better keep me in the movie regardless of whether Kai is in it.
I call Katie and bring her up to date. Then Ellen, who tells me, “He’s just scared, Juniper.
He’s panicking. He’ll come home with you.
” But I have spent my life chasing after irresponsible people who have excuses for being irresponsible, and one does rather tire of the labor.
In fact, one begins to feel just the tiniest bit enraged.