Page 17 of Hollywood, Ending

“You don’t want to tell me about it?”

“I do, but it will change things, and I don’t want to change things.”

“Okay,” I said. He was quiet for a while and then I said, “The thing about my mom is she didn’t want to want what she wanted. She didn’t want to drink. She didn’t want to…I mean, I’d wake up and she’d be gone and I’d have to get myself to set. My mother was always there—every audition, every callback, every day on set—and so when she wasn’t there, it was terrifying. I remember when I was like twelve or thirteen, I’d have to call the producers and someone in transpo would come and pick me up and take my brother to school and everything.

“She’d show up a couple days later sweating whiskey, and she didn’t want that. I would eat cereal for dinner or stuff I took from set and watch TV and worry that she wasn’t coming home at all. I would take care of my brother. He was even littler. I was so scared all the time. Of course she didn’t want that for us, but it still happened, you know?”

He just nodded, inviting me to keep talking, so I did. “And then when she was home, it wasn’t always better. She’d get drunk and say terrible things to us—terrible. She used to call me piggy whenever I’d eat, because she wanted to keep me skinny. One time she was shitfaced and she said she didn’t love us, that she wanted to, but she couldn’t. I wonder a lot if that was true. It couldn’t have been. But then, she did say it.

“She would make me take my pulse—this was when I was six or seven—and she taught me to count the heartbeats through my wrist for fifteen seconds and then multiply times four to know my heart rate. She would sit me down at the kitchen table and have me take my pulse and I would tell her, ‘A hundred,’ and she would say, ‘Get it down to eighty,’ and so I’d calm myself, tell myself I was at peace. I’d act, you know? And I could do it. I could get my heart rate down to eighty. And then she’d hit me, and ask me my heart rate, and I’d say one twenty or whatever and she’d say no, no, get it down to eighty, Juniper. Keep it at eighty. Then she’d hit me again. And eventually I learned to keep it at eighty even as she hit me. She’s standing above me, and I’m seated at the kitchen table, and she’s hitting me, and I’m trying to keep my pulse at or under eighty.”

I reached my right thumb to my left wrist and felt the life in me. “Even now,” I said, “telling you about this, I can keep it right at eighty. I can take it lower if I want. Feel.” I reached my arm over to him, and his soft fingers pressed to my wrist. I kept my pulse low, then sped it up, then slowed it down again. “Acting,” I told him. “Just like she taught me.

“She always loved my success, though. Loved it when I booked a gig. I used to think, Someday she’ll get sober. Someday we’ll have a real relationship. She’ll ask for my forgiveness, and she’ll atone, and I’ll forgive her, and we’ll be able to have a real relationship. But now that’s impossible, you know? Because she’s dead now. You never realize how permanent death is until somebody you love dies.” I only noticed then that Kai was still holding my wrist.

10

I had two days off because Kai and Matthew were filming scenes with the woman who played Warhol’s friend Pat Hackett. My flight to LA for the audition wasn’t until four p.m., so I spent the morning at the Carnegie Museum of Art. I don’t know much about contemporary art other than what I learned researching Andy, but I like art museums. I like the cafes. I like watching couples look at art together. I think what I like about museums is the same thing I like about acting: Acting is a chance to visit rooms in my mind that I have no other way of discovering.

I was standing in front of an abstract Joan Mitchell triptych painting, for example, and out of nowhere I remembered this Donald Hall essay where he writes that his uncle kept everything, including a box labeled “String too short to be saved.” Why did that painting make me think that thought? I kept looking at the painting and I thought about our scene at the nightclub, how it both was and was not Kai who was crying. I thought about kissing him, how one way or another—out of character or in it—I would kiss Kai soon enough.

I kept looking at the painting and I started seeing it in three dimensions. I sat down on a hard white bench and heard the low hum of an air conditioner somewhere. The three panels of the painting pulled me in. Blue, orange, yellow, and green swaths of color with occasional bursts of red. The painting didn’t look like anything in particular, really, but I felt like I could walk into it. It seemed to me almost a landscape of the human interior, like the way it feels to remember that everyone you know is going to die.

_____

In the cafe, I wrote in my journal.

Who is the you aside from the list of things you are? Abuse survivor, daughter, friend, ex-girlfriend. Is there a you outside of all the identities, or are you a collection of them? When conceiving Carly, you think about everything and everyone she went through, but isn’t there a separate self, an ineluctable you? Do you know that part of her or are you just collecting her traumas?

Right then, I got a text from Kai.

I miss and love you but spending the day with Matthew Malone is fucking magic. He just told me, “A good life fits in your car. A great life fits on your motorcycle.”

I responded, He just says this shit like it’s nothing.

Him: He called me “a cool cat” earlier.

Me: You ARE a cool cat.

Him: Thank you. I have always wanted to be a cat.

Me: You being a cat person is maybe the least surprising thing about you.

Him: I just want to lie in the sun and be certain that I am loved. Where are you right now?

Me: I’m in the Carnegie Museum. Spent the morning looking at contemporary art, which I enjoy but do not really understand. Maybe I need to take a class in it or something.

I saw the three dots appear and then eventually disappear. Time to go back to work, apparently. I walked through the nineteenth-century nature-y paintings of the museum, but they didn’t really speak to me. Then on my way out of the galleries, I was stopped cold by a Kerry James Marshall painting of a young Black woman at an art gallery wearing a botanical-print skirt and a loose-fitting turtleneck. I loved the painting but didn’t really understand it. I wished I knew more about art—why I liked what I liked or even if I was liking the right stuff.

I took a picture of the painting and then made my way back to my apartment. I ate a banana and some cantaloupe, and posted a carousel about my museum trip to Instagram. Scrolled through Insta liking and commenting on my friends’ pictures and then went through and commented on some recent posts tagging me. I’d gained eleven thousand followers—I was near four million now—since posting that pic with Matthew. He’d crush Instagram, but of course he’d never get one. Proper celebrities didn’t need Instagrams. Insta is access—you are making yourself available to the world in exchange for their attention. Real stars, the ones light-years away from the rest of us, don’t need to strike that bargain.

As I packed for the trip, I grieved my mother. I thought about how excited she’d be for this audition, how she’d call and text me before auditions no matter how shitfaced she was. For me, grief isn’t the same thing as missing someone or loving someone; it is the feeling of absence, the awareness of a void. She would always call me “my little girl” or “my brilliant actress” or “my special baby.” Always hers. And I still was. I was still hers, still in her thrall.

_____________

My previous movie, the one shot by the Cinematographer, was a romantic dramedy in which my character is falling in love while grieving her father, a stand-up comic who was rarely home with her. Of course, I did not know when I took the movie that before it wrapped, I would be grieving a parent of my own.

Every movie romance needs an Obstacle, a reason the characters don’t naturally fall into each other. In our movie, the Obstacle was that my love interest pretends to be married to please his parents, only my character thinks he is actually married. It’s a stupid Obstacle—most movie Obstacles are—but you only have two hours to tell a story and so you need shortcuts. In real life, of course, the Obstacle is always confoundingly complex. For example, Andy Warhol’s Obstacles to romance were: 1. He felt ugly, 2. He worshipped fame and beauty, 3. Sex terrified him at least as much as it titillated him, 4. He struggled to find the person amid the performance. In my relationship with the Cinematographer, the Obstacle was that he wanted me until he had me, at which point I became progressively less interesting. These are not good movie Obstacles.