Day 2
The next morning a car is waiting for me at five a.m. I take the car to the airport, and then a plane to Montego Bay, and then a car along the northern coast to Oracabessa, the little town where Ian Fleming lived while writing the James Bond novels.
My driver keeps pointing things out to me along the way—here’s the beach where they filmed The Blue Lagoon; here’s where you can swim with dolphins; here’s the haunted Rose Hall Great House.
When I arrive at the resort, a young woman named Hazel tells me they’ve reserved the Fleming Villa for me, the house where Fleming actually lived.
The villa—with a private pool, a private beach, three separate living quarters, an outdoor bathtub, and an expansive view of the ocean below—seems a bit much for a single person, but I don’t turn it down.
_____
I know I need to look for Kai, but I don’t really want to, so I spend the morning journaling as Agrippah, trying to inhabit her voice.
When I’m working on a character, it’s hard to say if her voice becomes mine or mine becomes hers, but there’s a moment past which I feel comfortable as that new person, and I’m not there yet.
The hard thing for me isn’t Agrippah’s power or need to cling to it.
I understand that. What I need to get closer to is Agrippah’s vulnerability, the way Gavinth both exposes and exploits her compassion.
Compassion is often mistaken for weakness, but it is vastly stronger and more courageous than apathy, and I want to express that through Agrippah.
I’ve packed a book of nineteenth-century women writers, and I read the preface while thinking about how much Agrippah knows of her husband’s betrayal, and when she knows it.
The truth is, I want Kai to find me. I want him to rush toward me and apologize for abandoning me, for reading my text asking where he’d gone and then literally throwing his phone in a trash can rather than responding to me.
_____
I decide to go swimming. After a long period in the abstract time of junketing and promoting, it feels strange and lovely to walk into the eerily calm water, my skin prickling until I get used to the temperature.
I swim out into the ocean a little and turn onto my back to float and stare up at the cloudless sky.
Feels good to use my body. If you’re not careful, you can forget that you have a body—that, on some level, you are a body.
I swim around to a lagoon where smaller villas dot the shore.
A lifeguard offers me a mask and a snorkel, and then I can see thousands of little fish wending their way through the seagrass below me.
Halfway around the lagoon, I notice a sea turtle swimming calmly a few feet away from me.
I track the turtle for a long time, watching it come up for air every so often, its grace and size an absolute astonishment.
The thing is, sea turtles know exactly how to be sea turtles, whereas I do not know very much about how to be a human.
So much of what is within baffles me. I feel to myself mostly like an abstraction, like that Joan Mitchell painting in Pittsburgh.
I make it back to my private beach, tired from the long swim.
I towel off, put on a cover-up, and set out in search of some food.
And that’s when I finally catch up with Kai, who is daydrinking at an outdoor bar on the ocean’s edge.
The bar is plastered with photographs of reggae stars, and Kai is saddled up next to it, drinking a Red Stripe beer while staring out at the ocean.
There’s a well-fed tabby cat curled beneath his chair.
He puts the beer down and hunches over his sketchbook. He’s drawing the view.
“Kai,” I say.
“Juniper,” he answers. If he is surprised to see me, his face doesn’t betray it.
“You can’t just make me fall in love with you and then disappear,” I tell him. “It’s inconsiderate.”
He smiles unabashedly. “I just couldn’t take it.”
“Then call me and say you can’t take it.”
“I didn’t want to ruin your night.”
“Instead, you’ve ruined much more than my night.”
“Sorry,” he says without the faintest hint of actually being sorry.
“You didn’t even respond to my text. You read it, and then you threw your phone in the garbage. How is that supposed to make me feel?”
“You said—when I told you it was Matthew—you said, ‘What are we gonna do?’ You didn’t say you were sorry. Or that you were angry. Or that Matthew is despicable. You said, What are we gonna do? Like everything that happened is just some minor inconvenience to your career goals.”
“You can’t just disappear on people because you don’t like how they reacted to something. We can talk about it; we can fight about it, even. But you can’t just disappear. Can you imagine how it felt to me? To wake up and you’re nowhere? I thought you were dead.”
“We have nothing in common,” he says. “People go through these experiences together and they think they’re in love because you have this huge thing in common, which is the movie, which is the junket, and then it ends and they realize that’s the only thing they had in common.
” He takes a sip of his beer. “I guess we do have one thing in common: We’re both trainwrecks.
I just want to blow up my life, and you’re still chasing your dead mother’s dream. ”
“That’s really hurtful,” I say. I can feel the tears behind my eyes and I try to stop them but I can’t.
There is such coldness in his voice. “Who sent you, anyway? The studio?”
“The studio told me where you were, but I wanted to come.”
“How’d they find me?”
“They had people trace your credit cards.”
“That’s so fucked up,” he says. “Even without my phone they can track me. They think they own me.”
“But I wanted to see you. To make sure you’re alive.”
“I’m magnificent,” he says. “I am living the dream.”
“Will you come home with me?”
“Absolutely fucking not.”
“Kai,” I say.
“You wanted to see if I’m okay. I’m okay. Mission accomplished.”
_____
I walk away, hoping he’ll call after me and apologize.
But he lets me go. I walk back to my villa and let myself cry a little.
He is right about the premiere, of course.
I shouldn’t have said, What are we gonna do?
But what are we gonna do? How can you respond to betrayal when all the responses make your life worse?
I wonder if Kai is right about me, that I am still just chasing my mom’s dream.
After Star Catcher wrapped, Mom told me I would probably never work again on anything of significance.
She told me this while hammered, of course, but still, she said it, and now I have vanquished her, finally proving her wrong.
I’ve never had a movie get near these reviews, near this buzz, and I do feel like I have something to prove to her even though she is dead. Maybe especially because she is dead.
_____________
I walk down to my little private beach and lie in the sun and call Jamie.
“It’s still early, but we’re slightly overperforming expectations,” she says.
“Slightly?”
“I think we’re looking closer to a twenty-five million opening than twenty, which is amazing.
I won’t lie, with our momentum I was imagining we might even get to thirty, but twenty-five is miraculous.
And that’s just domestic. Almost double the budget without a significant ad spend.
We’re gonna win the weekend. And the CinemaScore is good: A-minus. ”
“Minus?”
“Juniper, you are hard to please.”
“But the test scores were so high.”
“This is a win. Twenty-five is a massive win. This project is mostly a stepping stone, anyway. And now you step to Gods of Andromeda.”
Every project is about the next one. Real success is right out there, just past the horizon line.
“This movie isn’t about the first week. It’s about the first decade. It’s whether it’s in the awards conversation. We’ve got a long way to go. Just get that kid’s head straight and we’ll be fine. But we need him for a campaign. You can’t win shit in this town without a good campaign.”
_____________
I stay down at the beach for a long time. I want Kai to come and find me, but I know he won’t. I read for a while, and discover an Emily Dickinson poem I really like. I’m not even sure what the poem is about, but I like how it ends:
So We must meet apart –
You there – I – here –
With just the Door ajar
That Oceans are – and Prayer –
And that White Sustenance –
Despair –
You there, I here, with just the door ajar.
It makes me think of Kai, the unsolvable distance between us, the way I can’t get into his head and he can’t get into mine even if we’re both pretty good at getting into other people’s heads.
There’s always a distance between you and I, a chasm that cannot be bridged, and even though we are both at the same resort on the same island, I am here and he is there, with just the door ajar.
_____________
I call Matthew Malone that afternoon.
“Kid,” he says, “our movie is gonna be number one at the box office this weekend.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Looking like twenty-five.”
“Twenty-seven the last time I heard, and that’s just US. Might have to get myself another Warhol. You feeling good?”
“Matthew, you need to call this resort, GoldenEye, ask for Kai, and apologize.”
“Apologize for what, the abuse thing?”
“Yeah. For the abuse thing.” I feel the frustration in my voice.
“No worries, I’ll give him a call. He had a rough go of it, huh?”
“Yes, Matthew. You revealed something intensely private to the world.”
“I figured he might not understand.”
“I also do not understand.”
“We trade in our frailties, Juniper,” he says.
“Even the everyday person on Facebook, they get more attention when they reveal their dog just died, or they’ve gotten cancer, or whatever.
The world runs on attention. Who gets it, and who doesn’t get it.
Your life is better if you get it. And I got plenty of it for Kai, and our movie. Someday he’ll thank me.”
“I doubt that.”
“Well, someday at least he’ll understand,” Matthew says confidently. “I’ll give him a call. We need to be copacetic for the awards campaign.”
_____
At dinner, a guy—graying dreadlocks, dressed in shorts and a tank top—sings reggae songs accompanied by a single-string guitar.
He tells us between songs about performing with Ziggy Marley, then sings a haunting, harrowing version of “Redemption Song,” and I wonder how it must feel, having played for thousands, to now play for a few dozen tourists, most of whom aren’t even paying attention.
I think about how even the best female actors with the best careers are often retired by the Industry before fifty.
But it’s still a gig. You’re still getting paid to do what you love. Kai is wrong about me there. I’m not just trying to live my mother’s dream. I am also trying to figure out my own dream for myself. I pull out my notebook and write a little.
The point is to do what you love as long as you can do it as well as you can do it.
That’s what art demands of us. But isn’t that also what your mother told you?
That everything must be sacrificed in the name of the great god Art?
Maybe I’ve been choosing wrong the whole time.
Kai was an asshole when he said I was chasing my mom’s dream, but he wasn’t wrong, just like I wouldn’t be wrong if I said he’s running not because it’s the noble or heroic thing to do, but because it’s the thing he couldn’t do when he was in high school.
How can we escape being products of the past?
_____
Back at my villa, I take a shower and then yet again reread the Andromeda script. I can hear the waves lapping against the beach just upwind. When I walk outside to see the stars, there’s Kai in a beach chair, looking out at the ocean, chewing a piece of gum.
“Nothing like a nighttime hangover,” he says. “Why’d you have Matthew call me?”
“Because he needed to apologize.”
“Well, he did. He said he was sorry if he hurt me. I love an apology with an if. ”
The distance between us feels unbridgeable. I here—you there. I walk over and sit down on the chair next to him and look up at the star-drenched sky.
“I’m really fucking mad at you,” I say at last. “You can’t abandon people like that.”
“Well, then we do have something in common, because I am really fucking mad at you,” he answers.
I don’t want to lie to him, or hide anything from him, so I just tell him. “They’re gonna fire me from Gods of Andromeda if you don’t come home. Todd says we’re a package deal. Both of us or neither of us.”
“Your priorities are so fucked up,” he says. “There will be other movies for you.”
“There will be,” I say, “but I don’t want to make other movies. I want to make this one. With you.”
“I am so sorry to inconvenience you,” he says, “but I’m not going home. I’m not making Gods of Andromeda. I’m done. I’ll find something else to do. Maybe I’ll become a server here.”
“You’re being ridiculous. You’re acting insane.”
“There is nothing ridiculous about aspiring to be a server. I was a server eight months ago.”
“I came all the way down here to get you, and you’re being—”
“I didn’t ask you to come here.”
“You said you loved me.”
“I do love you.”
“Then fucking act like it?”
“By going back into the meat grinder? No thanks. I don’t love you that much.”
“You’re being a child.”
“Fuck off.” He stands up. “I don’t need to be lectured by you.
” He looks down at me, something new and scary in his eyes.
“Are you here because you care about me, or are you here because you need me to do Gods of Andromeda? Because if you actually cared about me, would you be asking me to go back to that world?”
With that, he leaves. It feels like he is a stranger, like I have been tasked with bringing somebody I’ve never met back from the Caribbean.
His eyes, usually so warm and attentive, are distant now.
I want to scream at him that we are supposed to be in love, but I just let him go.
I go back to staring at the stars and end up falling asleep beneath them.