Chapter 4
Morgan
The kitchen was the warmest room I had stood in for a year, and the woodstove was the least of why.
Gus had it lit and a pot of coffee going at seven at night like a man who had never once been kept awake by anything, and he had a way of filling a chair that made the whole room arrange itself around him without his asking, and I sat down across from him with my ruined hands wrapped around a mug I didn't deserve and felt myself lean toward all of it like a houseplant at a window.
Holt stood at the counter with his back half to us, eating like sitting was a luxury he was rationing, and I read the geometry of it right away.
Gus was the sun in here. Holt orbited. He ate on his feet in a room with empty chairs in it, and nobody but me seemed to find that worth remarking on, least of all him.
"So," Gus said, and folded his hands on the table like a man opening negotiations. "You're famous."
"A little." I gave him the modest one. "In some zip codes."
"My granddaughter's going to lose her mind.
She's nineteen, she's at the college over in Gunnison, and there's a movie of yours she's near about worn out, watched it so many times I could say the lines through the wall.
Some fool thing where you're a prince, or a spy.
I never could keep it straight." He squinted, enjoying himself.
"She'll want a photograph, and you'll send her one, or I'll know the reason why. "
"I'll give her ten."
"One's plenty. Don't spoil her." He said it warm, but there was a hook in it, a small test of whether I'd overpay for affection, and I felt myself graded and was surprised to want to pass. "You eat meat?"
"I eat whatever's put in front of me, sir, and I say thank you for it."
"Good. It's elk and it's been in the pot since Tuesday.
" He put a plate down in front of me, stew and a piece of cornbread the size of a paperback, and I ate all of it and took more when it was offered, which seemed to settle something for him that my whole career had not.
Somewhere in Los Angeles there was a woman whose entire job was deciding what I ate, and I had not thought about her once since the airport.
Holt's plate, when he set it in the rack, had been half the size of mine. He'd worked twice the day.
"Sir." Gus looked over at Holt's back. "He called me sir."
"I heard him."
"You could try it."
"I could," Holt said, to the window, and Gus laughed, a big slow laugh that pulled twenty years off him, and I laughed too because it was easy and because I wanted to be inside the sound of it, and Holt rinsed his plate and didn't turn around, and I felt the laugh die against his back the same as the smile had died in the yard.
I tried him again over the next half hour, because trying was the only setting I had ever owned.
"How bad was the winter?" I asked his back.
"Bad enough."
"Bad enough that you're behind, or bad enough that you're worried?"
That was the real question, and I asked it in the voice I used when I wanted a true answer, which had worked on a producer, a studio lawyer, and my own mother. Holt set the pan down on the rack. For about a second I thought I had him.
"Bad enough," he said, and turned on the tap.
I told the story about the horse on the Wyoming shoot that bit a producer on the seat of his pants, which had bought me a hundred tables.
Gus laughed until he had to take his glasses off and wipe them.
Holt ran water into a pot and left it to soak.
I offered to help with the dishes and he said no without turning around and meant it all the way down.
That was the whole act, and I'd got through it in under an hour.
It wasn't that he disliked me. I'd been disliked by professionals, some of them on retainer, and dislike was something I could work with, because at least it meant I'd registered.
This was something else. I had spent an entire evening throwing everything I owned at one man and not one piece of it hit him.
I had never met anybody I couldn't get to.
Any sane man would have left him alone. I sat there planning the next thing to try.
Gus kept me at the table an hour. He asked me real questions, not the press-junket kind.
Where my people were. Who had taught me to work.
Whether I slept all right. I gave him answers shaded a few degrees truer than I'd planned to.
Lying to Gus felt like a thing that would show.
And the kitchen was warm, and the coffee was bad and strong, and the old man kept looking at me like I was a person and not a property, and a starving man did not interrogate the bread.
He watched me the whole time without ever appearing to, which was a skill I had paid people to teach me. Once, when I'd made some easy joke to get past a question I hadn't liked, he let it sit a while and then said, gentle, "You work awful hard for a man sitting down."
I laughed. That was the whole point of me, and it had never once failed to close a subject.
Across the kitchen Holt had gone still at the sink. The two of them had a language I wasn't anywhere near fluent in, and the entire place ran on it.
Before he turned me loose he said, "How long's the picture keep you after this?"
"Depends. Twelve weeks if the weather holds. Longer if it doesn't."
"And then."
"Then the press. Six countries, I think. Maybe eight."
"And then."
I looked at him. He wasn't going anywhere. "Then the next one."
"Where's home in all that?"
There was a version of that question I'd answered on camera four hundred times, with a warm little joke in it about my dog. I didn't have a dog. Somebody's assistant thought of it in 2019 and I'd been running it ever since.
"I keep a place in Los Angeles," I said.
"That's not what I asked you."
He let me off it. "Long way to live," he said.
"A man ought to have somewhere he comes back to.
" He turned the mug a quarter turn on the table.
"I'm after the girl to come home for the summer.
She's got exams and God knows what else and a hundred better offers, and I'd like everybody under one roof a while yet, while I can still count heads. "
He drank off the last of his coffee and set the mug down. "Holt's never been past Denver in his life. You could tell him about the ocean sometime. He'd go to his grave before he'd ask."
I had been handled by professionals. This was not that. The old man wanted nothing from me, and I had no idea how to be in a room with somebody like that.
Holt set the last pan in the rack. "I'm going to bed."
"Get his fire going for him first."
"He's got a stove."
"He's got a stove he's never lit and a pair of hands that don't work. Walk the man to his bed, Holt, God almighty, were you born in a barn." Gus winked at me. "He was, near enough."
So Holt walked me across the dark yard and neither of us said anything. He didn't fill it. I had never in my life not filled a silence, and I caught myself matching his stride, which was a thing I generally did on purpose and got paid for.
The cold made my teeth ache when I breathed. Overhead were more stars than I had seen in my adult life, the whole spilled spread of them, and the three black peaks blotting out a wedge of it.
I had three or four good lines ready about a sky like that.
They had worked on balconies in two hemispheres.
I looked at the side of his face and put every one of them back, and we kept walking, and nothing out there wanted anything from me, and I hadn't known until that minute how tired I was of being wanted.
He came into the bunkhouse and built the fire without being asked, crouched at the stove and laid it in a particular order, kindling and splits and the one fat log, and lit it with a single match while I stood there useless with my arms wrapped around myself.
"You watching," he said.
"I'm watching."
He had no idea I was watching him. That was the thing that undid me. I had spent thirty years in rooms where every living soul knew precisely who was looking at them, myself worst of all, and here was a man down on a plank floor with no part of himself arranged for anybody.
I wanted him so suddenly and so stupidly that I had to look at the wall.
I had kissed a lot of beautiful people, some of them for money and a few for free, and every single time there had been a part of me standing off to one side keeping an eye on how it played.
That part had nothing to say about this.
It wasn't there at all. There was just me, thirty-five years old, freezing, ruined-handed, wanting a man who hadn't looked up.
"You do it your own self tomorrow. I won't be out here.
" He stood, and the fire threw his shadow up the wall enormous, and for a second I forgot to be charming and simply looked at him, a big tired man who had built me a fire he'd told me he wouldn't build.
He caught me at it. Whatever was on my face got to him before I could take it down, and his own face did something complicated and shut, and he left without saying goodnight.
I stood in the middle of that cold room with my heart going like I'd run somewhere.
I sat on the made bed in my coat until the stove turned the room from brutal to merely cold.
Everything I owned hurt. I peeled off the gloves Holt had thrown me, off hands that had swelled to fill them, and found the blisters had opened and dried into the leather, so I had to work them loose, and I sat in the lamplight turning my own ruined palms over like they belonged to a man with a harder life than mine, which for six weeks, I supposed, they did.
My hands had stiffened into claws around the shape of the fork and my back was a single long bruise and there was manure dried in the seam of jeans I would be throwing away, and I sat in the iron quiet with no signal and no people and nobody to see any of it, and I waited to feel as alone as I was supposed to.
It didn't come. I had been lonelier in rooms full of people who loved me on a contract than I was in that freezing shack at the foot of nowhere.
Nobody out here wanted the smile. Out here it was no good to me, and finding that out was the first easy hour I'd had in years.
I lay on the iron cot listening to the stove tick, swollen-handed and reeking and grinning at the ceiling for no reason I could have defended in a court of law, and thought that if Renata could see me now she'd have had me on a plane by noon for my own protection.
It was the best company I'd had in months.
I decided, lying there warm down one side and frozen down the other, the fire ticking and the stars hard in the black square of the window, that I was going to win him.
I told myself it was the work. I'd come to learn the life from the inside, and the man who actually lived it was asleep a hundred yards off with scarred hands and a wall around him a mile high, and a man could not play what he had not been let near.
I needed Holt to forget I was a movie star long enough to let me see how he stood inside his own life, and the only road there ran straight through the thing he kept locked down.
Research, I called it, lying to myself in a voice I had spent a whole career learning to believe.
The other part I didn't call anything at all. It had no use in it anywhere. It would have handed back every balcony and every good line about the stars for one more second of him looking at me before he got his face shut, and it was still going long after the fire had burned down to nothing.