XVIII Jack
XVIII
Jack
“Are you ready?”
CJ sits across from me at a metal table, not unlike the ones we shared on the lot. She stares at me intently.
“I’m ready,” I tell her. Her hair is down, a way she never wears it while she’s working, and I’m smitten with how perfectly it frames her face.
“Are you sure?” she presses. “Because what you are about to eat is going to change your life. There will be a before, and there will be an after.”
“I’m ready! Anticipation has built.” I am carefully cradling a heavy taco al pastor. CJ has her own trio in front of her, but she’s too focused on my meal to look at her own. She leans forward as I take my first bite.
The combination of flavors—char, salt, tang, sweetness, spice—hits me hard. I cover my mouth. “OK, wow.”
We’re at an unassuming spot in Atwater Village, the first stop on CJ’s “LA on the other side of the velvet rope” tour. “You sound like a food blogger,” I teased when she shared her plan, masking my genuine gratitude that she knows of actual places where we won’t get papped—the mythical establishments I swore existed when pitching her on a date. Up until now, my version of LA has been the “Hey, look this way!” version of LA.
In my excitement over my second bite, I unleash sauce onto my linen shirt.
“Wait, wait, I got it.” CJ digs through her purse and triumphantly pulls out a Tide pen. As she wields it standing over me, I put my hands on her hips and pull her closer.
“I wish I could say that I have this because I’m a mom, but you should know this is just who I am. A person who has carried on-the-go stain remover since college.” She laughs at herself and taps the wet patch on my chest, letting her finger linger before breaking our contact and sitting back down to her meal.
“Actually, I knew that about you even if I didn’t know that about you.” I watch CJ tuck into her first taco with scholarly fascination. “When’s the last time you were here?”
“Agnes and I came right before Gatsby . I try to check off my favorites ahead of a big project, knowing I won’t get my fix for a while. Agnes only eats the chips, but someday.”
“That’s what I’ve missed most about all the coming and going the last few years. I’ve barely been able to visit any of my favorite pubs in London. Or, frankly, have an actual meal. Most of what I eat is crafty on set or those tiny little appetizers at parties,” I say, going in for another bite of taco.
“Why not between projects?”
“I have small pockets, mostly reserved for hanging out in my flat in my underwear. And seeing my family,” I tack on.
“They’re all in London, your family?”
I nod. “Yep, Mum, Dad, and my older brother, Mark.”
“Older brother! How am I only hearing about this now?”
“He’s three years older.” I pause, trying to find the best way to describe Mark. “He’s a really nice chap.”
CJ drops her chin. “That’s the kind of thing you say about, like, your friend’s husband you met one time.”
“Well, he is!” I insist with a laugh. Will she think I’m a monster for not being best mates with my own brother? “So,” I say, reaching for the napkin dispenser. “We were never really close growing up. Now, he’s a banker. Married to a lovely woman he met at uni. Lives down the road from my parents. We just... don’t have much in common. I think the only thing we’ve texted about in the last five years is Arsenal.”
“Really?”
I nod, fishing my phone out of my trouser pocket. I scroll up through our most recent exchanges: articles about our favorite player’s injury, forecasts about how the team may perform that season, celebratory emojis when they did well, curse words when they did not. I hand my phone to her.
“There are a lot of ‘bollocks’ here,” CJ notes.
“They haven’t played well in a long time.”
“If anything ever happened, he’d be there in a heartbeat,” I add as I tuck my phone away, acknowledging Mark’s goodness, if not our closeness. “My family.” I never quite know how to put this. “They’re kind people. They just don’t really feel like mine, if that makes any sense.”
CJ’s eyes go a little sad. “How do they feel about...” She swirls her hand about indicating my general form.
“Me being out with you? I haven’t told them.” She rolls her eyes. “Me being an actor? I think it confused them for a long time. They assumed I’d grow out of it, and then when I didn’t, panic set in. But seeing me perform on the West End, I think they finally got that I was doing this for real.”
“Not when you got Flames Flicker Eternal ?”
“You mean my big full-frontal moment? No, that didn’t go far with my parents.”
“I just meant it was a big... part.” She trips over her word choice. “I mean, an important part for you.”
“No, no, keep talking about how big my parts are. I love it.”
CJ giggles and shakes her head and takes a sip of her lemonade. “Too much.”
“It didn’t seem like too much, the other—”
“Jack. My God .” She swats at my forearm and lets her hand rest there, a finger tracing from my wrist to my elbow. A moment passes. I don’t know how much touching is allowed in public, and I don’t want to push it.
CJ picks up a plastic fork and holds it to her mouth, like a microphone. “Now, tell me, Jack, why is it that you decided to bare all on the BBC?” she asks in her best faux-journalist voice.
“Well, I figured, women are expected to do it all the time. Why should it be such a big deal for me?” I tap the fork’s prongs with concern. “Is this thing on?”
After lunch, CJ drives us to our second stop. No GPS, twisting and turning as the roads become narrower, ascending through the canyons. Along the way, she points out where various celebrities once lived as we cross Mulholland Drive: Madonna, Warren Beatty, Joni Mitchell, Jack Nicholson.
“We used to cruise up here all the time in high school.”
“Did you know anyone who lived over here?”
She whips her head as if I’ve lobbed a horrific accusation her way. “ Please. I’m a valley girl,” she says, fake tossing her hair. “We mostly liked looking at all the big houses.”
“Is that what teens in the valley do for fun?”
“No, but it’s what my friends and I did for fun.”
“Do your friends work in movies too?”
“Some of them. A lot of their parents worked in the business, which made filmmaking seem like less of an impenetrable fortress. Between them and Stuart, this world seemed almost normal. Which, obviously, it is not. But my closest friends from growing up mostly left and did something else. One’s a doctor in Vermont; another’s an event planner in the Bay Area. Another just moved to Chicago for a job at the Art Institute. We’re in touch, but not as much as I want to be.”
I relate to that last part, and there’s comfort in knowing my distance from those closest to me—Tom so nearby, George back in England now—might not be the rarity it sometimes feels like it is: a product of my highly specific and sometimes selfish life choices.
“What is this place?” I ask as CJ pulls up to what could only be described as a wooden shack, not unlike the kind of place where we’d buy fresh fish during summer holidays in Brighton.
She arches an eyebrow. “You’ll see.”
We climb out of the car, and my skin prickles. It’s unclear if it’s a response to the cool, summer night air, the streaks of pink and purple in the sky, the company, or... this evening altogether. I look at CJ looking at the sunset, and I wrap my arms around her from behind, leaning my cheek against the top of her head. I feel myself getting unexpectedly choked up, and I blink, not wanting to get caught in... what exactly? Turning emotional over a fully cinematic moment, surrounded by hilltops with this woman I feel like I know better than I possibly can?
CJ tilts her head. “Wait until you try this place’s ice cream. It’s the perfect soft serve. They’ve been here forever . Jane Fonda used to come here when she was a kid.”
She reaches for my hand and tugs me toward the shack.
“We have to eat it in the car, though,” she turns back to tell me. “Because there might be mountain lions.”
“Right,” I say, hoping that I’m successfully downplaying my alarm.
CJ grabs the doorknob, but it doesn’t turn. She knocks. No answer. “It’s summer hours. They’re supposed to be open until 9.” She knocks again, calling out, “Hello?” She shakes her head. “They said they’d be open.”
“We can go somewhere else.”
“But we’re supposed to go here .”
This is not about the ice cream, I’m realizing. It’s that CJ had a plan, and CJ doesn’t like when her plans change. I pull her to me, and she takes a deep breath in and holds it before letting it out. Then she laughs.
“I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but I like when things go a certain way. When the vision in my head comes to life.”
“And I’m very attracted to that about you. I’ve never met someone so capable of knowing what they want and making it happen. You’re rather good at being in charge.”
She laughs louder. “That’s a nice way of saying ‘bossy.’”
“Exceedingly competent,” I say, and she relaxes into me. To be able to touch her this way, to openly embrace after what felt like an eternity of restraining ourselves, sends reverberations throughout my entire body. I wonder if I’ll ever get used to it. Part of me hopes not.
I kiss her forehead, urging her brows to unfurrow. “I have an idea.”
She looks at me quizzically.
“Oh, just trust me,” I say, amused by her inability to let me take over. “I’ll be directing you this time.”
Her mouth opens to argue, but I just grab her hand.
Twenty-five minutes later, we’re standing outside the Burbank Costco, each of us with a cone in our hands. Chocolate for her, swirl for me.
“You’re right,” she says, her tongue gliding up her ice cream in a way I don’t think she realizes is seductive. “It’s maybe the second-best soft serve I’ve ever had. How did you know to come here? To this very American institution?”
“Sabrina’s daughter, Tom, is absolutely crazy for it. She’s always begging to go to Costco.”
“Tom’s your friend who had the bachelor party?”
“ Stag party,” I tease. “But yes, we’ve been friends since uni, and he’s my person—the one I go to for everything.”
At this, her face transitions to a distant stare. “That used to be my mom, for me.”
I can feel my heart expand in my chest, and I reach for her hand.
CJ sighs and nods. “It always felt like the two of us against the world. I mean, financially, I think Stuart helped some when I was growing up, but she never wanted to rely on anyone else. But she had to work a lot . And that’s why I try to be careful about my hours. When Agnes is older, I want her to feel proud of the work I do but not like it’s all I do.”
I nod, picturing teenage CJ doing her homework by herself at the kitchen table.
“It sometimes feels like an impossible balance to strike. Which is maybe where my obsession with planning comes in,” she says, returning to her ice cream.
We stand in the twilight at the edge of a vast California parking lot, and I think about the last decade of my life and all the things I could have never planned. “But some accidents are happy.”
“Agnes.” She smiles.
“Our meeting at a random bar—and then meeting again years later,” I add.
She blushes. “Ending a first date at the Burbank Costco.”
Single best date of my life , I can’t bring myself to say aloud.