Page 63 of Hollywood, Ending

I just smile for a moment, and then go back to my talking points. “Juniper is genuinely and truly one of my closest friends. When something great or terrible happens, she’s the first person I want to call.”

“Can we go off the record?” she asks. Ellen has told me about this. If you say something stupid and then try to say “That was off the record,” the reporter can still publish it, because you can’t retroactively take something off the record. But if you ask to go off the record, and the reporter agrees, whatever happens next in a conversation can’t be written about. But I’ve never heard of a reporter asking to go off the record.

“Sure,” I say.

“I just want to talk to you like a normal human being, and I feel your brain churning every time I ask you a question. It’s got to be exhausting for you, and I know it’s exhausting for me. So, off the record, what’s it like?”

“This? The junket?” She nods. “It’s like you’re a medieval soldier stabbing at me with a sword, and I’m deflecting the sword with my shield. As long as my shield holds, I’ll be okay. But it does take some concentration to keep the shield up.”

“But if the shield goes down, all you tell me is the truth.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Exactly.”

“What’s so bad about that?”

“The truth belongs to me. That’s my life you’re talking about. My most personal, intimate feelings. My…whatever. My worst memories. My best memories.”

“Yes, but we’ve made a deal. You exchange pieces of yourself for celebrity. Celebrity keeps you working, keeps you paid. Keeps me paid, too.”

“Except once I’ve traded those little pieces of myself, I can’t get them back. They’re not mine anymore.”

“Right,” she says. “Okay, I get it. Back on the record?”

“Sure.”

_____

She never asks me about it, about the ever-present it. We eat dinner, and she asks me about my childhood in Indiana, tells me she’ll be interviewing my brother and my parents. She asks me if I liked high school. She asks me if I can remember the first time I knew I was good at acting. I tell her the truth, that I’m still not sure I’m good at acting but I can remember the first time everything fell away and I felt fully absorbed into a character. I was in high school, and we were doing You Can’t Take It with You. It was the dress rehearsal, and I wasn’t thinking about my lines or my blocking; I wasn’t thinking about anything because I was too busy playing Paul. Play. That’s what we call it. You’re playing a character; the thing you’re in is a play. But if you’re really lucky, in moments it stops being play, stops being make-believe and becomes a kind of magic. You aren’t Kai Laramie with his baggage and his worries. You aren’t just playing; you are becoming. That dress rehearsal was the first time I ever felt that I’d become someone, that for a flashing moment I was not playing Paul but was, in fact, Paul. And if you’ve ever had that high, you’ll sacrifice a lot for the chance to have it again.

“That felt honest,” she says after I tell her. I don’t answer. Not sure what to say. “I was never an actor,” she tells me, “but there’s something akin to that in writing. The feeling of losing oneself, that it isn’t even you writing the words but you are instead a kind of aqueduct through which the words flow.”

_____

Jill and I part ways, and Ellen is waiting for me in the lobby.

“Well?” she asks.

With Jill gone, I feel the anger well up in me. “Did you set up the sweaty guy in Juniper’s Uber?”

“No,” she says, but I’m watching her eyes, and I see both fear and guilt swirling in them.

“You put that guy in the Uber. He’s not even a fan. Jill interviewed him.”

“Fuuuuucccckkkk,” she says. “Fuck.” She takes a few steps away from me, then paces back toward me. “We need to get somewhere private.” I follow her to the second floor, to a little conference room festooned with posters of our movie. She closes the door behind us.

“I didn’t know,” she says. “Just for the record. They didn’t tell me until three days later.”

“They?”

“The studio. Todd, specifically. It’s always Todd. He plays dirty.”

I hear my voice rising. “And you didn’t tell me.”

“No, Kai, I didn’t tell you, because what good is it for you to hate Todd? You hate Todd, and you don’t do Andromeda, even though doing Andromeda is great for your career. I was trying to take care of you. I was trying to…Fuck.”

“He leaked my abuse too, didn’t he?” I’m almost screaming now. I can feel the heat behind my eyes. “And you knew about that, too.”

“No,” she says. “No no no. I never told Todd about that. I don’t trust him. No. God. I should’ve told you. I knew I should’ve told you. But I didn’t want you to hate the studio.”