Page 77 of Hollywood, Ending

“So I show up for every shoot on time. Every interview on time. I’m the consummate professional. And you fire me because he isn’t professional. Have you ever noticed, Todd, that it’s always the men who get to be, as you call them, artistes? Have you ever noticed that women don’t get that luxury?” I’m staring at Todd’s boot soles, which are closer to me than any other part of him.

“I know you think I make the rules,” Todd replies. “But I got into this business to make great movies, and now I’m stuck being The Man. I don’t make the rules any more than you do. There’s a Man behind me, and one behind him, like Russian nesting dolls only they get bigger and bigger until you get to the shareholders, and all that matters to them is the stock going up. It’s the market you’re mad at.”

“Nobody wants to own up to their own power, Todd. It’s inconvenient. I’ll go to Jamaica. I’ll bring Kai back. And you’ll remember that I went on an errand for you the next time I need a favor. You’ll remember that I—unlike most people in this fucking industry—can be counted upon.”

“I like your spark, kid.”

“Yeah,” I say.

_____

I call Jamie and tell her she better keep me in the movie regardless of whether Kai is in it. I call Katie and bring her up to date. Then Ellen, who tells me, “He’s just scared, Juniper. He’s panicking. He’ll come home with you.” But I have spent my life chasing after irresponsible people who have excuses for being irresponsible, and one does rather tire of the labor. In fact, one begins to feel just the tiniest bit enraged.

Day 2

The next morning a car is waiting for me at five a.m. I take the car to the airport, and then a plane to Montego Bay, and then a car along the northern coast to Oracabessa, the little town where Ian Fleming lived while writing the James Bond novels. My driver keeps pointing things out to me along the way—here’s the beach where they filmed The Blue Lagoon; here’s where you can swim with dolphins; here’s the haunted Rose Hall Great House.

When I arrive at the resort, a young woman named Hazel tells me they’ve reserved the Fleming Villa for me, the house where Fleming actually lived. The villa—with a private pool, a private beach, three separate living quarters, an outdoor bathtub, and an expansive view of the ocean below—seems a bit much for a single person, but I don’t turn it down.

_____

I know I need to look for Kai, but I don’t really want to, so I spend the morning journaling as Agrippah, trying to inhabit her voice. When I’m working on a character, it’s hard to say if her voice becomes mine or mine becomes hers, but there’s a moment past which I feel comfortable as that new person, and I’m not there yet.

The hard thing for me isn’t Agrippah’s power or need to cling to it. I understand that. What I need to get closer to is Agrippah’s vulnerability, the way Gavinth both exposes and exploits her compassion. Compassion is often mistaken for weakness, but it is vastly stronger and more courageous than apathy, and I want to express that through Agrippah. I’ve packed a book of nineteenth-century women writers, and I read the preface while thinking about how much Agrippah knows of her husband’s betrayal, and when she knows it.

The truth is, I want Kai to find me. I want him to rush toward me and apologize for abandoning me, for reading my text asking where he’d gone and then literally throwing his phone in a trash can rather than responding to me.

_____

I decide to go swimming. After a long period in the abstract time of junketing and promoting, it feels strange and lovely to walk into the eerily calm water, my skin prickling until I get used to the temperature. I swim out into the ocean a little and turn onto my back to float and stare up at the cloudless sky. Feels good to use my body. If you’re not careful, you can forget that you have a body—that, on some level, you are a body.

I swim around to a lagoon where smaller villas dot the shore. A lifeguard offers me a mask and a snorkel, and then I can see thousands of little fish wending their way through the seagrass below me. Halfway around the lagoon, I notice a sea turtle swimming calmly a few feet away from me. I track the turtle for a long time, watching it come up for air every so often, its grace and size an absolute astonishment. The thing is, sea turtles know exactly how to be sea turtles, whereas I do not know very much about how to be a human. So much of what is within baffles me. I feel to myself mostly like an abstraction, like that Joan Mitchell painting in Pittsburgh.

I make it back to my private beach, tired from the long swim. I towel off, put on a cover-up, and set out in search of some food. And that’s when I finally catch up with Kai, who is daydrinking at an outdoor bar on the ocean’s edge. The bar is plastered with photographs of reggae stars, and Kai is saddled up next to it, drinking a Red Stripe beer while staring out at the ocean. There’s a well-fed tabby cat curled beneath his chair. He puts the beer down and hunches over his sketchbook. He’s drawing the view.

“Kai,” I say.

“Juniper,” he answers. If he is surprised to see me, his face doesn’t betray it.

“You can’t just make me fall in love with you and then disappear,” I tell him. “It’s inconsiderate.”

He smiles unabashedly. “I just couldn’t take it.”

“Then call me and say you can’t take it.”

“I didn’t want to ruin your night.”

“Instead, you’ve ruined much more than my night.”

“Sorry,” he says without the faintest hint of actually being sorry.

“You didn’t even respond to my text. You read it, and then you threw your phone in the garbage. How is that supposed to make me feel?”

“You said—when I told you it was Matthew—you said, ‘What are we gonna do?’ You didn’t say you were sorry. Or that you were angry. Or that Matthew is despicable. You said, What are we gonna do? Like everything that happened is just some minor inconvenience to your career goals.”

“You can’t just disappear on people because you don’t like how they reacted to something. We can talk about it; we can fight about it, even. But you can’t just disappear. Can you imagine how it felt to me? To wake up and you’re nowhere? I thought you were dead.”

“We have nothing in common,” he says. “People go through these experiences together and they think they’re in love because you have this huge thing in common, which is the movie, which is the junket, and then it ends and they realize that’s the only thing they had in common.” He takes a sip of his beer. “I guess we do have one thing in common: We’re both trainwrecks. I just want to blow up my life, and you’re still chasing your dead mother’s dream.”