Chapter 35
Will had been out on such a limb when asking Simone this favor, he hadn’t been fully prepared for her to actually say yes. What would have taken all of Will’s rainy-day money and Margo exhausting every last one of her precious credit card points to achieve, Simone did in a matter of seconds. She was not forthcoming about why she was using agency resources to help Will out, but he got the feeling that she had her own reasons.
And so a three-hour coach journey, two-hour wait at Heathrow, eleven-hour flight, and fifty-five-minute cab ride later, Will arrived at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles.
Despite Patrick’s stories, Will had been unsure of what to expect from LA. It was the city of dreams, or at least purported to be, yet most of what he saw of Sunset Boulevard from the back of the taxi had been drugstores and coffee shops and, he was pretty sure, the nightclub where River Phoenix died.
Will got out of the car and into the lobby, instantly grateful for America’s love affair with air-conditioning: He’d left an island shrouded in damp fog and landed in a desert. He approached the front desk, and the concierge—who looked as much like a movie star as anyone Will had ever met—gave him a look with which he was becoming familiar. It was the once-over that asked: Are you famous? Are you worth my time? How nice do I need to be to you?
“Hi,” he said, and bloody hell, why was he waving awkwardly at this well-groomed, chicly dressed, not-at-all-sweaty gentleman? “I’m here to see Patrick Lake?” he continued. “Erm…Simone should have let you know I was coming? Simone Toussaint?” He hated the way everything he was saying came out as a question, like he knew deep down that he wasn’t supposed to be here, and any moment the man on the other side of the desk would sense it, too. But after a few hushed words into an earpiece that gave him the look of a backing dancer for Janet Jackson, the concierge nodded briskly and directed him toward the elevator.
Simone—he assumed—was standing there waiting when the doors slid open on the third floor, immaculate in a Gucci suit and Louboutins.
“Hello, Will,” she said. “It’s so good to finally meet in person.” Her face gave no indication that it was, indeed, good to meet him. Perhaps she was as partial to Botox as Jordan. Or she simply didn’t see this bedraggled stray from England as worth the risk of wrinkles.
Here she is, he thought. The woman who has held my fate in her hands all this time.
Will felt about Simone the way he felt about every other powerful woman he had ever met: as fascinated as he was cowed. Heels like that were powerful but, he knew from experience, hurt like hell after longer than a few minutes. He wondered if she kept a pair of sneakers under her desk for when nobody was around to intimidate. If she tucked a napkin into the collar of her ivory blouse while she was eating lunch. Not that Simone was the kind of woman who looked like she spilled things. Or ate, for that matter. And god, her makeup! That winged eyeliner could cut a bitch.
Enough!he told himself. We’re not here to stan.
“Hi, Simone,” he said. “Thank you for the flight. Honestly. I’ll pay you back.”
Simone exhaled impatiently at the notion that the price of his air fare might be remotely consequential. When Will had phoned her, he hadn’t had much of a clue what he wanted to say, other than to try and arrange a face-to-face with her client. He’d reasoned that, understanding now how Patrick’s world worked, he should show that he was willing to follow the rules, and check with Patrick’s “people” that he was open to talking. More truthfully, coward that he was, he’d been too afraid to call Patrick himself.
His best-case scenario had been that Simone would facilitate a Zoom. Instead, after hearing him out, she had simply said, “Leave it with me,” and five minutes later a British Airways reservation had landed in his inbox. He had no idea why she’d done it—she certainly didn’t seem the type prone to sudden bouts of generosity—but he wasn’t one to look a gift horse in the impeccably lined mouth either. He was just glad his passport was still in date.
“If the niceties are out of the way?” Simone took off at a brisk pace down the hallway. “Everybody is getting ready through here.”
“Everybody? Meaning…”
“Patrick will be here soon. He and a few of the others are attending the premiere together.” Simone paused in the last doorway at the end of the corridor. “Will, listen. I wouldn’t usually dream of distracting my client right before a premiere by flying in his secret ex-boyfriend. It is, frankly, amateurish behavior.” She examined her flawless manicure. “But after an unfortunate misunderstanding, I happen to have some making up to do to Patrick. And I know that he has not been the same since he came back from England. So. Here we are.”
“Here we are,” Will echoed, still not understanding fully.
“I will permit you to be here,” Simone said, “on the proviso that you wait for Patrick in the last bedroom on the right in the suite, do not interact with any other members of the cast, and when they all leave to attend the premiere, you stay behind. Do we have a deal?”
Will wondered how many other lives had been sent on a new trajectory by a verbal covenant in a hotel corridor. So this is Hollywood, he thought.
He thrust his hands in his pockets and said: “Deal.” He crossed his fingers, unseen, and followed Simone into the suite.
“Remember,” Simone said. “Go straight to that far room and don’t talk to anyb—”
“Will!” The entire room seemed to call his name at the same time in various levels of surprise: Audra was here, as were Hector and Corey and a handful of other faintly recognizable and pleasingly symmetrical faces.
“Will!” Audra sprang up from the chair, where Estelle was applying the last flourishes to her makeup, running over to hug him and thinking better of it at the last minute, air-kissing him so that her face remained untouched.
“It’s so good to see you!” she said. “You look terrible!”
Will couldn’t disagree, and confronted with a roomful of some of the most beautiful people on this coast, he suddenly felt completely out of his element. This was Patrick’s utterly bizarre world, not his. He couldn’t confront the man he maybe-loved and maybe-always-had in the painter’s trousers and tank top he’d sat sweating in for eleven hours. Maybe this entire enterprise had been a mistake.
“Bro!” Hector and Corey both said, almost in unison, and without a single jot of the homophobia Will had come to expect from that simple word.
“Hi, guys!” he replied, overcome with relief that they were both huggers and no embarrassing man-shake was required.
“Are you here to see Patrick?” asked Corey.
“That’s kind of the idea, yeah.”
“Well, thank god, goddess, and all the others for that,” said Audra. “He has been a total bummer these last few months. Have you ever done a press tour while lumbered with a sulking, brokenhearted sad sack? Not fun, let me tell you.”
Will decided to let all the ways in which the word “bummer” got lost in translation to an English homosexual go uncommented upon.
“It’s good to see you, man,” said Hector, clapping Will on the shoulder, nearly sending him through a wall in the process.
“Yeah, dude,” said Corey. “The gobshitery has been off the charts around here.” He paused. “Did I use that right?”
Will seesawed his hand. “Close enough,” he said. “You guys look…Bloody hell.”
Hector and Corey each wore suits that lovingly hugged their physiques, and Will reminded himself once again that looking that way was their full-time job. He resisted the urge to ask them both to turn around (because was there a greater sight in the world, outside of a sunset or a baby’s first steps, than a man’s bottom in tailored trousers?), and instead turned to Audra.
“I can’t see Patrick looking like this,” he said. “Is there somewhere I can freshen up?”
Audra was already riffling through the duffel bag he’d brought with him, tutting at its contents.
“And there goes the myth about gay men having style,” she said, taking him by the hand. “I suppose there’s nothing for it. You need a makeover.”
“A makeover?” Will asked.
“Well, sure!” Audra’s eyes sparkled. “You’ve just arrived in Hollywood. Time to change everything about yourself. Estelle!”
“We got you, man,” said Corey, and while Audra discussed the particular “challenges” of his Irish skin with the makeup artist, Will allowed himself to be led over to a rail in the corner of the room, where several garment bags hung like vampire bats.
“They always send over a bunch of different options,” said Hector, not pausing to explain who “they” were. “Take your pick!”
The tuxedos before him were, without a doubt, stunning. They were also, even more certainly, never going to fit Will, whose proportions were considerably slighter than those of Patrick, Corey, or Hector.
“This isn’t going to work,” he said. “I’ll look like a kid who got dressed up in Daddy’s clothes. And anyway, I’m not even going to the premiere. I’m supposed to just wait here.”
“Never mind that,” said Audra, joining them. “Will, go take a shower. First door on the left. Then go into the room next door. I have this completely under control.”
Too exhausted and overwhelmed to argue, Will obeyed, taking his duffel into the bathroom. He brushed his teeth with vigor, then stripped down and stepped under the rain shower. He didn’t know how long he stood there letting the water cascade over him, washing away what felt like days’ worth of grime. When he finally exited the bathroom in a fluffy white robe, he felt like he had been reborn.
Audra was waiting for him in the next room, along with another rack. She had shed her own robe and put on her outfit for the premiere; a glittering silver cocktail dress that, combined with her makeup and tousled updo, made her look like an editorial Tinker Bell: mischief refined and distilled into its purest form.
“Take your pick,” she said, gesturing to the clothes rail. “They sent me some gorgeous things, but half of them aren’t my color.”
Instantly, Will’s attention was captured by an exquisite piece of tailoring among the dresses: a double-breasted suit in a bold vermilion. The trousers, when he pulled them off the hanger and they slid into his hands, were wide-legged and high-waisted.
“Hello, gorgeous,” he whispered. This, far more than the black-tie garb donned by Hector and Corey, was his kind of suit. Womenswear as menswear, worn by a man who made his living dressing like a woman. Drag on drag on drag.
“Good eye,” said Audra, turning to face the wall so he could get dressed. Will pulled on the trousers and then slipped the jacket straight onto his bare torso, enjoying the feel of the unlined fabric on his skin. He went to button up the coat, but Audra stopped him, fussing over him until it hung open in precisely the right way, his nipples barely obscured by the broad lapels.
“You have a great body,” she said. “Show it off a little, won’t you?”
“Are you sure?”
“Trust me, I’m an actress,” Audra told him. “Learning my lines and crying on cue are only the first part of the job. For the women in this industry, the red carpet is the real final exam. And I happen to be something of a prodigy in that department. There, perfect…Now we just need to figure out what to do with your hair. Oh, and you need shoes.”
“What’s wrong with my hair?” Will asked, but Audra was already calling in Estelle and the hairstylist, an olive-skinned man in a tracksuit and a topknot named Javier. Corey followed them into the room, excitement written all over his face, and held up a spotless pair of white sneakers.
“I figured we’d be around the same size,” he said, tossing them to Will, who, in possibly the butchest moment of his life, caught them with ease.
“Thanks, man!” he replied, genuinely touched by the gesture, and then he was steered toward a chair, where Javier sprayed some of the world’s most expensive salt into his hair, teasing the damp frizz into slick, bouncy waves, and Audra offered a director’s commentary as Estelle lightly contoured his cheekbones. It was not entirely unlike getting ready with the girls upstairs at the Village. And in her own way, he realized, Audra Kelly’s job was doing drag just as much as any queen he had ever met.
“I feel like Cinderella,” he said.
“I played her once,” Audra replied dreamily. “My first gig.”
“Pantomime?”
“Theme park.”
When Estelle had finished lining his eyes with kohl, Audra loaned him several silver necklaces to layer across his bare chest, and a single dangling earring. Once he had put on the sneakers, which had such a thick tread that they were functionally no different from high heels, Will felt as mighty as if he were in full femme mode. Glimpsing his own reflection, his breath caught in his throat: Here he was, but so was Grace. Clark Kent and Superman in the same room at the same time, the moon in a midday sky.
He had proudly spat in the face of an angry mob. He had faced his fear and sung live. He had swallowed his pride and won back his dearest friend. Will Wright felt in that moment like he could do anything. Kick down a door, slay a dragon, or maybe even have a conversation with his ex.
Will reentered the main room to a wolf whistle from Hector, but the rest of the room was oddly still. Simone, who had been quietly absorbed in her phone since she first escorted him in, now paced the length of the room, hitting call over and over again and exhaling through her nose with increasing force each time that she got no reply.
“What’s going on?” Will whispered to Audra.
“It’s Patrick,” she replied. “He’s missing.”