Chapter 30
Michael
We’d spent the night bound together like matching shapes. I’d sensed nothing but the sound of her voice and the scent of her skin, thought about nothing but how to please her. I didn’t want to leave an inch of her body untasted or a thought unexpressed. I didn’t know her, but I did. In a way that was bigger than a simple life’s narrative, more important than the facts and figures of what had happened, I knew her. The planes of her face, the curl of her lashes, the line of her lips, I could memorize the beauty of them, but the expressions that flashed across her face were a surprise to my mind at the same time as they were familiar to my heart.
For the first time in my life, I felt three-dimensional. For a man whose life and work depended on feeling every part of his body from his fingertips to his heartbeat, the feeling was new and worth defining.
I’d spent half of my first year in the Yale drama department learning how to pour a cup of tea. It was insulting. I’d already worked with the best director in the business the summer before. The picture was in theaters with my name blazing across the top, yet there I was, getting berated daily because I couldn’t pour a cup of tea without looking as if I was “acting” as though I was pouring a cup of tea. Brad nailed it on day one and was on to bigger and better things in the first week. I had to work at it and get frustrated, hate tea, love tea, learn to not think about the tea then to think about it, and fill my head with anything but the muscle memory of pouring.
I had been the worst actor in the department. I aced math, history, every core course, but at my chosen field, I was a bust. My father thought it was hilarious and the reason I should do something else. My mother thought I was wasting my time in school at all, since I could just land parts based on my name. But what Yale taught me was that I needed training if I wanted to be any more than a hack.
But I’d been a hack. I’d made stuff up, invented a reality from a fantasy life. But there I was with this sleeping woman in my arms, not thinking about what I was feeling while closely observing the three-dimensionality of it.
My life had been written at birth, a list of opportunities read out loud to the world. Beginning, middle, and end. I had found security in that room to make decisions, yet the safety of limits. Laine had come and folded the paper, creasing my expectations in high school with her life story. Now, with her breath on my shoulder, she folded my life into an airplane and shot it out the window. The writing was the same, but the choices had changed, become wider and yet more limited. I’d gone from fake to real. From painting to sculpture. From acting as if I was living to actually being alive.
Every explanation fell short. Maybe some things weren’t meant to be captured and acted out later. Maybe some things were just meant to be lived. And lying next to this woman, I was living.
Laine took a sharp little breath that meant she was waking up. I wanted her to, because I wanted to spend time with her, but I didn’t want her to, because she was comfortable on me. Her eyes opened. She hitched herself up on her elbow and looked at the clock then fell back down with her head on my chest.
“Got a date?” I asked, moving her hair from her face.
“I dreamed about you in Big Girls.”
“Was I still scary?”
“Yeah. But then I woke up and it was you,” she said.
“Do you want breakfast?”
“I want to sleep.”
“How late do you usually sleep?”
She didn’t answer right away but stared doe-eyed out the window, her cheek pressed against my body. Then she got onto her hands and looked at me from above. “I’m not rich. I do well, but… the reason I sleep late is because I work late.”
A paper airplane, once folded, is always creased. The perfection of its beginning, its pure potential, can never be regained. When she reminded me of what I already knew, she’d picked up the plane and tried to flatten it, but it was changed forever. I could see it, but I didn’t know what she saw.
“This wasn’t a casual thing,” I said.
“I know,” she said, looking away from me.
“Things have changed.”
“For you? What’s changed for you?”
“I’m with you. That’s what’s changed. And I’m serious about that.”
She slid away until she knelt between my legs with her hands in her lap. Her nipples were hard in the cool morning air, peeking through the curtain of her hair. I wanted her again.
“I don’t know how to do anything else,” she said.
I didn’t know what to say. What would I want to hear if I suddenly couldn’t act? It was the only thing I knew how to do except rip up my elbow playing tennis. It was the only thing my father had known how to do before he dug himself a hole of drunken inactivity, and I didn’t know what to say to him either.
“Maybe,” she said, “when I’m working, I can shoot anyone else. None of your pack. There are enough celebrities in this town.”
“I don’t know if that’ll work.”
“No,” she said, staring into the middle distance, her limbs twisted and taut around each other. She was a ball of elbows and knees under a curtain of dark hair. “You’re right. It won’t. I took a picture of Brad the other day, and he knew me, and it just didn’t look right.” She scratched her head and rested her cheek on her knee. “I think I kind of screwed myself.”
“You can lean on me until you figure it out.”
“Are you offering me money?”
“You make it sound like something it’s not,” I said.
“What is it then?”
“A bridge to whatever comes next for you.”
She sighed and gave the middle distance her attention again. “I thought this might happen, but now that it’s here, it’s kind of, well… it’s still scary.”
She seemed so frail, a balls-to-the-wall street kid with sharp wit and a twisted posture. I’d put her in the exact position that terrified me. I’d taken from her the one thing she depended on. I was the one with the privilege. The pedigree. The one with his future written on a creased paper. I could find her a way out of it somehow.
I took her by the back of her neck and pulled her to me. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. After all this, having these guys outside my house and being followed and everything, I don’t think I could go back to it anyway. I know it’s legal and I know it’s a business, but I don’t know if I could go on knowing I made people feel like that.”
“Even A-listers?” I asked.
“Especially A-listers. You’re a bunch of pussycats.”
“You won’t starve, Laine. You won’t be alone.”
“I’ve survived worse calamities than you,” she said. “But you? I don’t know if you can handle me.”
“You’re Calamity Laine.”
She smiled and kissed me as if she liked the name.
“You know what would make me happy?” I rolled on top of her, pinning her wrists. “Fucking you again.”
“That’s it?”
I wedged myself between her legs and kissed her. “I’m going to miss you taking pictures of me.”
“I can take them, I just can’t sell them.”
“Why not? Because you like me now?”
“Because it’s not the same. The pictures I took in the loft upstairs? Remember those?”
I put my lips on her breast, sweet with sleep and the previous night’s indulgence. “I remember.”
“You should see them. They’re not the same. They’re intimate. Even the way they’re framed, and the light is so soft on them. No one wants that. At least no acquisitions person I know would want them. And besides, I wouldn’t sell them without your permission. I couldn’t…”
I looked up at her. She stared at the ceiling, and though her thumb stroked my shoulder, she went far away.
“Earth to Laine.”
“Let me show you them.”
I took my mouth off her body and rolled over. “Go, before I change my mind and take you again.”
“Empty threats,” she said when she was out of reach, looking over her shoulder and smiling.
As if on cue, my phone rang as soon as she was out of sight.