Page 65 of Hollywood, Ending

Juniper knows everybody at the party, so she starts circulating. Charles Oldham is there, the guy I beat out for Gods of Andromeda. I talk to him for a while about the new Edgar Wright movie he just booked, and he makes it sound very cool. Everybody’s so good at making their lives look amazing. Even though I know Charles wants the part I have, I still feel a little jealous of the one he’s ended up with.

Then, at last, Matthew shows up around ten, wearing a tan suit with a button-down shirt that is hardly buttoned. His chest hair is showing. Matthew is, if nothing else, sculpted. He finds me and hugs me and I ask him if he wants a drink and he says he can’t because he has TV in the morning and anyway he drove his motorcycle here. I ask him where he’s staying and he says he has a place in the city. “Actually,” he says, “come over tomorrow after press. Bring Junie. We’ll have dinner.” I want to tell him about what Todd did, but Juniper has made me feel like maybe it’s not a big deal.

Lon introduces me to the guy from Mattel, who tells me their Hot Wheels movie is going to be incredible, and I tell him that sounds amazing, even though a Hot Wheels movie in fact sounds to me like the end of something important, like the final breath in the long life of art itself. While the Mattel guy talks at me, I’m trying to figure out what art even is, why we make it, and indeed whether I’m making it, or whether I’m making something else. I want to talk to Juniper about this, or about anything, but she’s got her arm around Charles Oldham, and they’re both talking to two girls who look like models.

After a while there’s no one I want to talk to and I’m a little drunk, so I leave. Juniper texts me to come to an afterparty at someone’s place, but I don’t much feel like going out. I think maybe I like being alone too much for this job. What I really want is for Juniper to come over to my hotel room and for us to watch a movie together, slightly-but-not-confirmedly cuddling in that way we have. Maybe I also want more than that, but I can’t process the wanting more, can’t allow myself to want it, because what if she doesn’t want to be imagined that way? Isn’t it a kind of violation to think about someone as they don’t wish to be thought about? He would always tell me that he thought about me constantly, that he loved remembering what we did together and imagining what we might do, and I didn’t like him thinking about me.

_____

I don’t usually look for what people are saying about me, but when I get back to my hotel room, for some reason—drunkenness, probably—I go on Twitter and search for my name. I read the first result.

I went to school with Kai Laramie and he is not the hero everyone says. He didn’t stop our pedo teacher; some other kid did. But Kai gets all the credit because he’s famous. He’s typical Hollywood—he doesn’t reveal the pedos, he indulges them.

Only six retweets and fourteen likes, but still I feel a surge of dread. It’s true, too. I didn’t stop our pedo teacher.

I try to go to sleep, but can’t stop thinking about that phrase. He indulges them. Had I indulged him? I remember once I asked to go to his house. I didn’t like doing stuff at school—it felt way too dangerous. I asked to go to his house and he said sure. He only lived a few blocks away. His house was low-ceilinged and dingy and poorly lit with overhead can lights that were either burnt out or too bright, and he offered me a cup of coffee and then he played with my cock through my pants and then took it out and told me we didn’t have to rush for once, and I let all of that happen. Was that indulgence or survival?

6

The next day includes a long photo shoot with Juniper, and then another round of interviews in the afternoon. They’re all normal and predictable and not too stressful except for one guy who comes in and asks, “What was the meaning of life to Andy Warhol?”

I let Juniper handle that one. Then the interviewer says, “What’s the meaning of life to you, Kai?”

I don’t know the meaning of life. The meaning of life is to avoid answering questions about the meaning of life. The meaning of life is to sit next to someone you’re sometimes in love with and definitely love. The meaning of life is that we are monstrous to each other, and tender to each other, and that the monstrosity and tenderness are inseparable. The meaning of life is chocolate ice cream. I don’t know. So I freeze up and Juniper jumps in.

I feel so stupid in that moment. I hate feeling stupid. It’s not unlike the smallness I felt with him, the powerlessness. Maybe the meaning of life is to have enough power that people can’t hurt you, can’t assert their power over you, and I’m thinking all this while Juniper says, “I think to Kai the meaning of life is to be generous toward other people. That’s how he acts, at least.” I lock back in and say, “Yeah, that’s so kind of you, Juniper. And to Juniper the meaning of life is doing good work with good people,” and she looks at me in that way she has, the way that is both genuine and for the camera, that is entirely performed and entirely authentic, and she says, “Gosh, you’re a sweet boy.”

It isn’t even a big deal—Ellen doesn’t say anything to me afterward—but I spend the rest of the afternoon hyperaware that I’m in an overlit room with a camera operator, a sound guy, two publicists, Juniper, and a rotating cast of interviewers. It’s exhausting. I want to go home. I don’t even know precisely what constitutes home at the moment, but I want to go wherever it is. We do another best friend quiz with one of the interviewers, and they ask about our favorite animals, and together we say, “The rhinoceros that escaped the Prague Zoo,” and we laugh, but I actually do think it’s become my favorite animal.

During a break, Ellen tells me, “They just announced a Paris premiere. Matthew is huge in Europe. This is big, Kai. I’ve never gotten a European premiere before. So on the first you’ll be in Paris, then back here on the second for the New York premiere.”

“You’ll be with me?”

“I should be employed at least until that New Yorker profile comes out.”

_____

We’re back in photo shoots from four until six, and then it’s time to go to Matthew’s apartment. I realize I don’t actually know where he lives, so I text him, and he writes back immediately with an address on the Upper East Side. Juniper and I get in an Uber. When we settle in, she says, “What’s the meaning of life to you, Kai?” and I laugh.

Juniper is wearing perfectly distressed jeans and a cozy sweater. I want to reach out and put my arm around her, but I’m not sure if that would be excessive flirting and also I’m not sure I’m allowed to want what I want.

“In my interview with Vogue this morning, they asked if you were a good kisser and I said that you were very gentle, and Katie got mad at me because apparently gentle isn’t sexy.”

“Would Katie prefer me to be an aggressive kisser?”

“I guess so. She said men have to be seen as alphas, and I was like, not my men.”

We talk about prep for Gods of Andromeda, how we’ll have trainers to get us ripped enough to look hot wearing body armor. We leave for Vancouver two weeks after Andy Warhol Never Gets Old comes out, and we talk about what we might do during those two weeks. I tell her I might go back to Indianapolis and she says she wants to go with me, see all the corn, and I tell her, There’s no corn in Indianapolis; it’s a proper city, and she laughs.

_____

New York traffic is terrible, and we should’ve just taken the subway, but I get recognized almost every time I’m on the subway now, and it’s a little tiring. The question people ask me most often is why I’m on the subway, as if there’s some secret transport system for C-list celebrities. At last we get to Matthew’s building, across the street from the park at 85th Street. We tell the doorman our names, and he calls up to Matthew then tells us the apartment is on the fourteenth floor. Instead of the elevator opening into a hallway, it opens right into Matthew’s ridiculous apartment, with floor-to-ceiling window views of the Central Park Reservoir and the Upper West Side in the distance. He has minimalist furniture including a black Eames chair, and a huge kitchen where a team of people are working. He’s watching TV when we come in but jumps off his immaculate leather couch and envelops both of us in a hug.

“God, I’m a little envious of you two. Just a couple of great young artists bumming around the city, everything still in front of you. I love to see it. What can I get you to drink?”

Juniper asks for a club soda and I order an old-fashioned, and someone in the kitchen gets to work on our drinks. Matthew walks us over to a Warhol painting of a dollar sign—green and blue on a yellow background—and says, “I gave this to myself after we shot our movie. Warhol said once, ‘I like money on the wall.’ So this is my way of hanging money on the wall.”

Juniper tells us that Warhol was beguiled by money, and then she searches on her phone for a quote she remembers from her research. “ ‘American money is very well-designed,’ ” she reads. “ ‘I like it better than any other kind of money. I’ve thrown it in the East River down by the Staten Island Ferry just to see it float.’ ”