Chapter Thirty-Seven
The next morning, I awoke to the faint sound of Josh in conversation on the little standing balcony.
I could see him from my bed, watched him speak into the phone as he slouched back against the railing.
I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep all of this a secret much longer.
Finally he hung up and came back to bed.
I had a meeting with Vespucci in the morning so we wouldn’t be able to linger too long.
‘Sorry, did I wake you? I tried to keep it down.’
‘It’s OK. Who was it?’ I propped myself up on my elbow and looked down at him, his dark eyelashes even longer and thicker from this angle, a cross-hatch of inky darkness.
‘Just Lex, my agent,’ he said, but there was tension in his voice.
‘Oh? All good?’
‘Yeah, just in final negotiations on my contract for Eagle Heart.’
‘Is that the superhero thing Lisa wanted you for?’ I knew it was, but I didn’t want him to know I’d been thinking about it.
He nodded, his eyes flicking over my face trying to gauge my reaction.
‘That’s great!’ I said, maybe a little too enthusiastically. I didn’t really think it was great.
‘Really?’
I frowned at him. ‘Of course!’
‘You really think that?’
‘Why wouldn’t I?’
‘Because you’re . . . you know . . . you’re on this different path now, everyone is raving about your new movie, you’re the hot new serious actress,’ he said. ‘I guess I thought maybe you’d think less of me for doing it.’
To me, the fact Orientations was going down well was irrelevant.
What mattered was the fact I’d given it a go in the first place.
Even if it had flopped, I would still have been glad to try material that stretched me, exposed me to different ways of working, even that paid me vastly less, just so I understood what it was like to exist outside of Wonderwick.
‘I don’t think less of you at all, I just . . .’
‘What?’
‘I would just love to see you really flourish as an actor, rather than just a star. Do you know what I mean?’ I said, tentatively.
‘We are actors.’
‘Of course we are, I know that, it’s just a really specific world that we’ve been operating in. I’d only done Wonderwick, at least you’ve been in other things, even if they were blockbusters.’
‘Wonderwick is what made you, too! It’s not like you’re better than blockbusters!’
‘It’s not about being better, it’s about wanting more.
It’s about and not or. I believe you can do more, can do something different, if you let yourself try.
I just don’t want you getting trapped in these huge machines, doing franchises and spin-offs of franchises forever and never finding out if you’re more than that. ’
‘So you think I’m making a mistake?’
‘I’m not here to tell you what to do.’
‘No, you just judge me for the decisions I make instead, right? It’s the same old thing we’ve been dealing with for years.
You’re smart, sensible, hard-working Emily and I’m lazy, stupid Josh who just wants to make dumb shit while you’re doing the real work, right?
I remember your reaction when I said I wanted to work with Edgar Malek!
’ he said, something I had completely forgotten about, that conversation in the alley at the Wonderwick video-game party where they sprung Darcy on me.
‘You were completely baffled by the implication that I might aspire to something like that! And now you’re judging me for, what, knowing my place? ’
I didn’t even know where to begin, didn’t know how to explain that I was mortified I’d made him feel like that, and how getting to know him over the past year had completely changed the way I thought about him.
That I’d been wrong, and that I believed in him, truly.
I wasn’t judging him. Tears stung my eyes.
All I could manage was, ‘Why are you pushing me away?’
‘Why are you pushing me away?’
‘I don’t even understand what we’re arguing about! It feels like this has come out of nowhere!’ I was starting to panic, like this was all spiralling out of control and I desperately wanted to reel it in.
Josh shook his head. ‘I shouldn’t have come. This was your time, you didn’t need me around to drag you down. You’re a shiny balloon and I’m a dead fucking weight. You and Ben? That made sense. You and me? I don’t know, Emily.’
‘Josh.’ I held my arms out to him but he was already packing, throwing his things into his suitcase like it was a bin.
And then he left.
I did the Vespucci meeting in a haze of disbelief, barely listening to a word anyone was saying, nodding and smiling politely, knowing that there were people there whose job it was to be paying attention.
Two nights later Orientations won the Golden Lion.
Oh, and I won the Marcello Mastroianni Award for Young Actor or Actress.
The first award I’d ever won for acting.
It was the most exciting moment of my career and it still felt like a loss.