Sebastian closes his eyes, listens to Lola’s subterranean rooting. Pain shoots up his calf.See, I told you, his body seems to say.This was a bad idea.At least it’s a half-decent excuse for skipping homework tonight. And skipping practice tomorrow. The week opens up in front of him, unencumbered. Beneath him, a noise.
“What?”
“I can’t find it.”
He heaves himself up, hobbles to the top of the stairs. “It was in a cardboard box.”
“Is it this?”
He scoots down the stairs on his ass, holding his leg out in front of him. The box is large and well packaged, a California address label cut through.
Inside him, something leaps.
“Open it.”
The bandage is forgotten. Together, greedily, they unpack it: two faded sundresses, a broken pair of plastic sunglasses, a crumpled receipt, a dog-eared Danielle Steel novel, a loyalty card for a café in Burbank with four stamps on it, two loose headshots (one smiling, one serious), a folding silver frame holding each of them as infants (one smiling, one serious), a card for a Los Angeles taxi driver, and a thick stack of scripts forLife and Times.
“Holy shit.”
There are dozens of them. There might be a hundred. Thick, marked-up scripts, a tower of days of her life, her name and thoughts and ideas in fanciful blue fountain pen and yellow highlighter, andMy God, this is proof. She was a real actress.His mind is barely catching up to the implication as he flips through pages hunting for MARGIE LUDLOW. She is there, entering CUP O’SUNSHINE café. She is there inthe margins, doodling a mug of coffee with steam rising out of it, sweet and distracted and familiar.What is my intention?she writes, and inside him something swells, threatens to overwhelm him, an overpowering righteousness at having found her.
“She was a star.” Joy like far-off fireworks. With terrible clarity, the universe rearranges itself: his father never wanted him to know the scale of this. “He hid her from us.”
“Who? Dad?” Lola looks pale. “I’m sure there’s a reason.”
“Lola, you can’t be serious.”
Above them, the sound of the front door. His father’s heavy footsteps. The enemy among their ranks.Fuck him, Sebastian thinks. He will come back tomorrow. Think what more there could be! Yes! He did come from somewhere, from someone, from a person who felt and lived the way she wanted. He knew her, he has always known her, he can know her again.
Awkwardly, he grips the railing, hops back up to the light.
“Are you coming?” he calls to Lola, lingering.
“In a minute,” she says.
Deftly, she had slipped the parcel of images behind her, trying to keep her hands still, not sure she could trust what she’d seen. Her brother, thumbing through scripts, in thrall of his own revelations, had not noticed their removal, had pawed through the haul as though it was complete. But now, alone, she retrieves a series of photographs of her mother’s bare body.
The woman in the photos is laughing. Staring sulkily at camera. Rolling curves of hip and breast, dark hair cascading. Clavicle and neck. She is wearing nothing but a necklace. She is wearing nothing at all. She is beautiful and complete but also shocking. Wrong. There is too much of her.Oh God.Viola’s stomach, sick with a horrible knowing, with unknowing, with suspicion and wrongdoing, with heritable dirtiness.Who took these photos? Who were they for? Did she ever… Was she…What? Unfaithful? Obscene?
Inside her, an origin story fractures. Refuses to reform.
1989
Late nights, blue lights, everyone smiling, coked, shaking the week off their shoulders, recovering from their plotlines. You have to become no one again, to disrobe from the character completely, before you can step back into yourself. Everyone is here tonight at the Whiskey a Go Go: Mark Flowers, Rip McFee, even Shona was around earlier. Orson is talking to the girl behind the bar, showing her how he shakes a cocktail. Maybe it’s the line she did an hour ago, but Susan cannot help feeling that everyone here loves her. That all of them believe in her, that she is a part of their glittering universe. Sometimes she feels like she is living in a glorious end state, as though the world—America!—has become its final freest form.Is it fair to be so happy?
Rip is handing her a margarita, sidling in next to her. “I owe you one.”
Today, Susan was attacked by a dog during an attempted bank robbery. The heist was Rip’s brainchild, and all the most desperate characters were swept up in it. It took all of Susan’s willpower to keep breathing as the animal experts trained the dog to jump up on her, to let it push her back playfully, allow it to lap her face with its wet, leathery tongue. Her throat is still sore from screaming.
“Maybe next time you could send her to a fancy hotel or something. You know. A pedicure.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” he laughs. She likes Rip, always has. He takes her seriously. And this storyline is big for him; they’re hunting for a new showrunner and all of the writers are trying to show their stuff.
“You know, Susie,” he says. “There are some big conversations about you right now.”
“Is that so.”
Margie has had a controversial reception. The fans are waiting for her to reap her deserts; after all, she’s broken up two marriages, orchestrated an arrest under false pretenses, and slept with almost every man in town.
