Page 83 of Hollywood, Ending

No traveler returns, puzzles the will,

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all…

“Wow,” I say. “How much Hamlet do you know? Do you know more than that? Keep it coming.”

“ ‘What is a man, / If his chief good and market of his time / Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.’ ”

“Kai, I’m not gonna lie. That’s sexy as hell.”

“An indecisive hero who can’t quite pull the trigger on his possibly self-destructive dreams? If you like that, well, I’m your man.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t walk up to the front of the theater and tell everyone that Matthew Malone sucks and will do anything for a little statue that he wrongly believes will finally make him enough in the eyes of whoever didn’t love him,” I tell him.

“Nah, I get it. To be honest, I don’t really want people to hate Matthew. People get too much from loving him. I don’t need the public to think Matthew Malone sucks.”

“But you need me to think he sucks,” I say, realizing it as the words come out.

“Yeah,” he says.

_____

Back at the villa, we watch another movie, this one a nineties action movie called Rush Hour. Then I tell him I need to work out, and he offers to exercise with me, so we go to the little indoor/outdoor gym at the resort and I lift weights and do push-ups and crunches. Kai runs on a treadmill for a while. I like the way he looks sweaty and tired when he finishes, drinking a little paper cup of water as he sits on a weight bench and works his breath back into his body.

_____________

That night, Kai and I start our third film of the day, The Pursuit of Happyness, an old Will Smith movie about fatherhood. As we watch it, I feel Kai starting to lean toward me, wanting to be closer to me. I’m watching him watch the movie more than I’m watching the actual movie, feeling his body almost touching mine, his head close enough to me that I can smell the dried salt water on his skin. I keep glancing over at him, trying not to move my head so he won’t sense me, and at some point I notice he is crying. As an actor, Kai could cry with his whole face contorting into sobs, but as a person, he cries silently, wiping away tear after tear without any fuss.

I think back to when Kai asked me what even makes a movie good. To be honest, I don’t love the movie; it’s a bit overwrought and melodramatic for my taste. But I find myself crying, too. Maybe a movie is good if it lets us feel things that are otherwise hard to feel. As cheesy as the movie is, it reminds me that love really does have power—maybe never as much power as it should, but enough to help us survive what we must survive. Movies can give us a window into a deeper self, that way-down place that hurts so bad we can only glimpse it in fragments.

“He fucked me up,” Kai says. I look up at him. “That’s what you must understand. I’d never even kissed anyone before. I had my first blow job before I had my first kiss. It strangles me. Even trying to tell you that now…strangles me.”

I put my arm across his chest and tell him the only true thing I can think to say, the thing he told me once when I needed to hear it. “I’m sorry, and I’m here.”

“I never got to figure out what I wanted, you know? Sexually, obviously, but even in other ways. I never got to develop my own desires because he defined them for me too early, too soon.”

“Right.”

“I’m so scared, Juniper. I’m. So. Fucking. Scared.”

We cuddle on the couch until he falls asleep in my arms.

Day 5

I wake up before him, make coffee, and then sit on the veranda to drink it. I have a splendid view of the ocean, but I keep looking over at Kai sleeping, his body hidden by a comforter, his head on a throw pillow. He looks beautiful there, and I remember reading a comment saying that his interview with The New Yorker came across as “thin-skinned.” But really, isn’t that the truth of skin?

I want Kai to be an actor because I want Gods of Andromeda to happen, but I also want Kai to be an actor because he is brilliant at it, because he has natural gifts. You hear some singers and think, Well, she’s just got it, and Kai just has it.

But none of this is what Kai wants. It occurs to me I’ve never really asked Kai what he wants. For that matter, I haven’t spent much time in my life thinking about what I want, because I’ve always been so busy wanting what the world wants me to want.

When he finally wakes up, I tell him, “You don’t have to do Gods of Andromeda.”

“I know,” he says.

“I don’t care if you run from the Industry, but I care a lot if you run from me.”