Page 29 of Hollywood, Ending

“You ever meet Matthew Malone?” Ellen asked.

“Sure, I met Matthew. Drove Matthew a few times. Nice guy. Quiet.”

“Matthew’s in the movie,” Ellen said.

I could hear Al smile. Matthew makes everyone smile. It’s his superpower. “That’s great. Congratulations. What are you doing next?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t even know what I’m doing tonight.”

Al laughed. Outside, Los Angeles was tinted gray. I’d only been here a few times. Before the movie, I spent a year in New York auditioning and working, and before that I was a senior in high school.

I don’t like to think too much about all that stuff, where you are in your life or in your career or where you live or whatever. It gives me a stomachache. I get the same stomachache when Ellen shows me the calendar laying out the twenty-three days before the movie’s premiere, or when I look at Reddit, or when the ATM asks if I want to see my account balance. I have some kind of stomachache most of the time, and so I don’t eat enough, which is part of the reason I don’t look like someone who is about to happen. All the guys who are going to happen in young Hollywood are ripped.

Everyone always says Los Angeles is sunny, but it’s mostly just dry. No weeds growing in the sidewalk cracks. Summer in Indianapolis looks like nature is about to take the land back from us—everything wet and humid and green and growing. In LA, even the green lawns look parched. Never enough water.

Al asked me if I liked Matthew. I told him I did, which was the truth, and I thought about one time when Matthew told me that it was easier to love than to be loved. But I wasn’t thinking of Matthew Malone. I was thinking about Juniper. I hadn’t seen her in a month before that flight. We’d FaceTimed, but I’d almost forgotten about her presence, the way air shifts when she’s near you, like how people’s voices change when they read poems out loud.

4

Al dropped us off at the Hotel Bel-Air. Ellen and I had to take three different elevators to get to my suite, which had a living room and a huge patio with its own miniature heated pool. It was larger than the studio apartment I’d had when we filmed Warhol.

I texted Juniper: My room has a pool.

Juniper texted back: If you turn the TV on and walk around the room, it follows you. Even when you live in a city, the studio will put you up when you’re doing promo, and so while Juniper was an Angeleno, she still got a free hotel room.

I turned the TV on. Romantic piano music played while the screen showed information about the Hotel Bel-Air. Ellen and I walked all around the room, and the TV tilted itself to face us wherever we went. When I ducked, the TV rotated downward so that I could still see all of the information the Hotel Bel-Air wanted to share about itself.

I had a text from Bob. Call me when you can. Arawas update. I didn’t really want to call him, though. Bob talked so much it was kind of exhausting, like the world was on fire and only his talking could put it out, and I was a little dizzy from the plane.

The living room couch looked beautiful but uncomfortable. Lots of right angles. There was champagne on the coffee table in front of it, and the bottle shifted a little as some ice melted. I turned off the TV. “Are we doing anything after we see the movie?” I asked Ellen.

“You are going with Juniper and the producers to the only vegetarian restaurant on earth with two Michelin stars. I am going to eat take-out Thai with my wife on our couch while we watch television and continue our long-standing argument about whether we can start a family when one of us travels so much for work.”

I went into the bedroom and lay on the bed on my stomach. Ellen followed me in, sat in a desk chair, and said, “The movie is really good.” She said it like she was sorry.

“But?” I said.

“No but. It’s a great movie. And you’re great in it.”

“But?”

“How do you feel about Juniper?”

“I love Juniper.”

“Wonderful.” Ellen checked her phone, stood up, and typed while she talked. “Kai, the test scores for this movie are insane. Do you know what test scores are?” I nodded, even though I didn’t really. “Ninety-two percent top two boxes. Ninety-two percent. So the scores are amazing, but it’s an art movie. Nobody even knows this film exists. Nobody knows what it’s called because the title has five fucking words. You know how many hit movies have five-word titles? None. Think of the movies that do well: Transformers is about cars that transform. Meet the Parents is about meeting the parents. This is a movie about an artist who is dead. You can’t possibly know how rare this is, how lucky you are to get a first movie that is pure fucking gold and could be in the awards hunt. But we have to get people to see the movie.”

Ellen tossed me her phone and said, “You see a pattern there?”

It was Juniper’s Instagram.

“A lot of pictures of her and me?”

The bed at the Hotel Bel-Air was the nicest bed I’d ever laid on. I started wondering how many nights I could stay there consecutively before I ran out of money. I’d never had a lot of money, but I’d gotten eighty thousand for the movie, and I hadn’t spent any of it. I had enough from being in two Lowe’s commercials to cover the rent in the apartment where I supposedly lived.

“How much do you think this room costs a night?” I asked Ellen.

“Are you listening?” she asked.