Page 43 of Hollywood, Ending

Bob didn’t say anything, which was so unusual for him that I figured he’d hung up on me. But then he laughed and said, “Listen, kid. I’ve got a dozen more scripts to send you that came in just this week. Some you’d be auditioning for the lead. It’s gonna probably be less money for you to do something else, but I’m here for your dreams, kid. I’m not like those CAA bastards. You don’t want to spend six months in Canada playing someone’s little brother, I’m not gonna force you. I’ll let ’em know.” And then he hung up.

_____

I wanted to see Juniper, so I texted her and asked if I could drop by her room. She wrote back immediately Ten minutes. Getting out of the shower. I pictured Juniper in the shower. I imagined her head tilted back, her thick hair straight and waterlogged, her big eyes blinking away shampoo, her collarbone, and so on.

When I got to her room exactly ten minutes later, her hair was in a towel and she was putting on makeup in the mirror. “I know you’re not as worried about this as I am, but don’t you feel like the cemetery scene reads almost satirical with that song and the way it’s currently cut?”

“Not really,” I said. “I mean, honestly, Juniper, I feel like my job was during the shoot and now we just—”

“But it’s our careers, Kai. Don’t you see that? This is our calling card. Maybe it’s different for you because—and don’t take this personally—there are so many more good roles for men, but I feel like for me this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and—”

“You’ve already booked the lead in a huge movie, Juniper. And you’re good in this. You really are.”

“But don’t you see the inadequacy of good? You don’t get to make this your life by being good.”

“What I meant is that you’re great in the movie.”

“I could be better if Kathryn hadn’t chosen again and again the most innocent, doe-eyed, woe-is-me take I offered her. I could be better if Lou Reed wasn’t droning on in the background of the cemetery scene. I come across as so one-note—”

“You don’t. Also, I like Lou Reed.”

“While you show so much range and depth of feeling,” she said.

“Juniper. You do seem innocent in it, but that’s why it’s so heartbreaking. You’re not ready for the shit you have to live through, but you live through it anyway. Honestly, it made me think about myself. I can give a kind of love to your character, a kind of love I can’t give to myself, and watching you in the movie, I kept thinking, I also deserve this love.”

“That’s incredibly kind,” she said, taking a step toward me.

“Well, it’s true.” I thought we might kiss but then she turned away and shook her arms out nervously.

“I can’t calm down. I haven’t been able to since that guy in the car last night.”

“Yeah. Ellen thinks maybe someone set that up,” I said. “That the sweaty guy was a plant or something. Katie wouldn’t do that, would she?”

“She can be nefarious, but she always tells me. No way that was a setup.”

“Right, I figured,” I said.

After a minute, Juniper looked at me through the mirror and said, “Do you want to see a movie that we’re not in?” She sounded shy when she said it. Innocent, even.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’d like that. Can it be something terrible?”

She laughed. “Indeed, it must be something terrible.”

_____

Juniper and I went downstairs and got into her silver SUV. For some reason, I was surprised to learn that she could drive.

We were battling traffic, inching toward the theater. Juniper kept starting to say something critical about the movie and then stopping herself. I told her that I was gonna pass on Gods of Andromeda, because I just didn’t think the part was big or interesting enough. She said she wished I could be the lead guy, her husband, and I said that I did too, but I didn’t look like a lead guy; I looked like the lead guy’s little brother, and she laughed and said, “You underestimate yourself, Kai.”

She filled the silence that followed by continuing to worry about our movie. “I just can’t stop thinking about it,” she told me. “I’m sorry, I know it’s annoying. I just want the film to be special, to be significant.”

“What even makes a movie significant?” I asked. “Everybody keeps talking about how good the movie is, or whether the movie is good, but I don’t even know what makes a movie good. Like, what is the point of making movies? Is it to make people happy? Then the movie is terrible. Is the point to make people cry? Then it’s great. Is the point to, like, reveal some deep truth about the human condition? Then I think it’s, like, good but not great.”

“Yes, that is the problem. It could reveal something deep about the human condition if it weren’t for the goddamned Lou Reed song.”

I offered Juniper a stick of gum. She declined. I unwrapped it and began to chew as I looked up what was playing at the theater. “There’s a Robin Hood movie that’s fifteen percent fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, but forty-eight percent of users liked it,” I said.

“Much too high.”