Day 4
Part of me wants to fly to LA and find the next thing. Let Kai recoil. Let him live his life, even if it’s the end for our movie and for us. But also: I know something of what Kai is running from, and I know you can’t outrun it.
I’m getting ready for the day—in pajamas, applying all the necessary serums to the face and brushing my teeth and whatnot—when I hear a voice shout, “Juniper!” I walk out to the pool, where Kai is standing, wearing board shorts and a long-sleeve T-shirt.
The air is warm on my skin, a light breeze blowing.
I walk up to him and hug him and feel him collapse into me.
His breath smells like beer and when the hug ends, he holds on to my shoulders, just looking at me.
His face is so symmetrical, his mouth so full, his nose so straight that it’s easy to forget he is real, except for those eyes.
The bloodshot veins around his deep green irises remind me: This is just a person, and to be a person is to be vulnerable and frail and temporary.
“Can we just watch a movie in total silence?” he asks. “Don’t ask me anything and I won’t ask you anything and we just watch a movie?”
“Hell yeah,” I tell him.
_____
I walk him over to the veranda, which opens up to a small patch of grass and the sea below.
I show him the villa’s little collection of DVDs and he chooses one, appropriately a Bond movie from the 1980s called A View to a Kill.
If Bond has teetered between campy and earnest over the last sixty years, this is the campiest one I’ve seen—silly and overblown and featuring loads of anti-communist propaganda that feels, to put it charitably, dated.
I lean against Kai like we always do, and he has his arm across the top of the couch, floating just above me.
Throughout the movie, I keep glancing over at him.
He doesn’t speak, and neither do I. This is part of what movies can be, a shared experience for people who don’t know how to share experiences.
Movies are something we watch together when we can’t look at each other, when we don’t know what to say to each other.
They are a site of shared enchantment. At last, just as the action is reaching its peak absurdity, Kai says, “Well, this is not very good.”
“How did people in the 1980s survive with such entertainments?” I ask.
“I’m mostly watching for the costumes,” he says.
“I’m watching for the deeply developed female characters,” I say.
He laughs. “I love movies. In spite of it all, I fucking love them.”
_____
After the movie, we walk over to the restaurant for some lunch. The waiter asks if he wants a Red Stripe, but he just orders a Diet Coke. He is a little more talkative now. “There are probably ways to just act,” he says. “Regional theater or whatever.”
“You would absolutely crush a local production of Hamlet,” I tell him, and then he starts in on some Hamlet.
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveler returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all…
“Wow,” I say. “How much Hamlet do you know? Do you know more than that? Keep it coming.”
“ ‘What is a man, / If his chief good and market of his time / Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.’ ”
“Kai, I’m not gonna lie. That’s sexy as hell.”
“An indecisive hero who can’t quite pull the trigger on his possibly self-destructive dreams? If you like that, well, I’m your man.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t walk up to the front of the theater and tell everyone that Matthew Malone sucks and will do anything for a little statue that he wrongly believes will finally make him enough in the eyes of whoever didn’t love him,” I tell him.
“Nah, I get it. To be honest, I don’t really want people to hate Matthew. People get too much from loving him. I don’t need the public to think Matthew Malone sucks.”
“But you need me to think he sucks,” I say, realizing it as the words come out.
“Yeah,” he says.
_____
Back at the villa, we watch another movie, this one a nineties action movie called Rush Hour.
Then I tell him I need to work out, and he offers to exercise with me, so we go to the little indoor/outdoor gym at the resort and I lift weights and do push-ups and crunches.
Kai runs on a treadmill for a while. I like the way he looks sweaty and tired when he finishes, drinking a little paper cup of water as he sits on a weight bench and works his breath back into his body.
_____________
That night, Kai and I start our third film of the day, The Pursuit of Happyness, an old Will Smith movie about fatherhood.
As we watch it, I feel Kai starting to lean toward me, wanting to be closer to me.
I’m watching him watch the movie more than I’m watching the actual movie, feeling his body almost touching mine, his head close enough to me that I can smell the dried salt water on his skin.
I keep glancing over at him, trying not to move my head so he won’t sense me, and at some point I notice he is crying.
As an actor, Kai could cry with his whole face contorting into sobs, but as a person, he cries silently, wiping away tear after tear without any fuss.
I think back to when Kai asked me what even makes a movie good.
To be honest, I don’t love the movie; it’s a bit overwrought and melodramatic for my taste.
But I find myself crying, too. Maybe a movie is good if it lets us feel things that are otherwise hard to feel.
As cheesy as the movie is, it reminds me that love really does have power—maybe never as much power as it should, but enough to help us survive what we must survive.
Movies can give us a window into a deeper self, that way-down place that hurts so bad we can only glimpse it in fragments.
“He fucked me up,” Kai says. I look up at him. “That’s what you must understand. I’d never even kissed anyone before. I had my first blow job before I had my first kiss. It strangles me. Even trying to tell you that now…strangles me.”
I put my arm across his chest and tell him the only true thing I can think to say, the thing he told me once when I needed to hear it. “I’m sorry, and I’m here.”
“I never got to figure out what I wanted, you know? Sexually, obviously, but even in other ways. I never got to develop my own desires because he defined them for me too early, too soon.”
“Right.”
“I’m so scared, Juniper. I’m. So. Fucking. Scared.”
We cuddle on the couch until he falls asleep in my arms.