Chapter 49
Michael
I didn’t care about the Academy Award nominations, but I saw the start of the announcements in the hotel lobby on a screen the size of a headshot. I’d forgotten about them, but once I saw a man and a woman stand at a podium, I knew what it was. They spoke English, and squiggly, indecipherable captioning ran underneath them. I’d worked with her on some blitzy action thing that was releasing in two months, and he acted in mostly fussy period pieces.
I sat on an uncomfortable chair and ate a roll with tea. I’d stopped pretending I wasn’t curious.
They announced the nominees for the small categories, and I watched, rapt. I cheered to myself when Big Girls was nommed for sound editing, followed by music, director, and screenplay.
Then actress—six nominees, with Claire Contreras among them. I was happy for her. She’d been wonderful to work with, and for the first time, I missed being on a movie set.
I wasn’t supposed to expect a nomination. I wasn’t supposed to even watch the announcements. I should have been running around Kowloon and making plans to move into mainland China. Anything but staring at the TV, waiting for something that promised fulfillment but would never deliver. A reward for doing everything right when nothing had felt right.
But it came, my name and my face, and I felt exposed again. Minutes after, when I was leaving the hotel with my bag slung across my back and my head down, my phone rang. I only accepted calls from my parents, and as expected, it was Gareth.
“Congratulations,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“Where the hell are you?”
“Kowloon.”
“What’s it like?”
“Crowded,” I said. “Rainy. But if I don’t tell them who I am, they don’t know and don’t care.”
I heard muffled voices from the other side, some rustling, then Brooke got on. “Sweetheart, come back, would you? The whole thing’s died down. No one even talks about that girl anymore. They just talk about your internet things. You can make it back for the ceremony.”
The ceremony, where I wouldn’t win because no one would vote for a man who may or may not have been a pervert. Everyone else from Big Girls would win, because they’d been excellent. Claire and Andrea, Max, who’d written the hell out of the thing.
“I can’t,” I said, and that was that.
She’d stopped arguing with me a month ago. I headed to China because I could and because they didn’t have televisions.
In the end, my father brought me back, that old son of a bitch. He was getting his liver transplant. When I’d called him, he said, “I don’t give a rat’s ass if you come home. I’m going to be unconscious. But if I croak on the table while you’re in Asia, you’ll feel like crap about it.”
I’d been huddled by a pay phone. I’d forgotten to charge my phone.
“You’re not going to croak,” I said.
“Damn right, I’m not. I want to see all their faces when you don’t show up to get your Oscar.”
I hung up thinking maybe I should go see my father pinned to a bed. I could watch everyone I’d worked with and respected win something. It would be fun. Then I could return to going wherever, whenever.
I hadn’t booked a charter. I wanted to be normal for another three quarters of a day. I wore sunglasses, a too-long beard, and a hat. That had never fooled anyone for long, but it would get me to baggage claim.
As soon as the plane hit the ground at LAX, my chest constricted, and I felt such a weight on me, my hair felt heavy.
I fell into old patterns: looking away from crowds, seeming preoccupied, rushing, wondering who would do what for me instead of me doing it myself. I wanted to get back on the plane.
A photo mural twenty feet long stretched across the concourse, showing a perfect blue sky and the word in white, the bottom tilted to the planes of the mountain.
HOLLYWOOD.
Seeing it like that, I didn’t think of the industry or the things I’d run from. I thought of the last time I’d been up there. With her.
I thought about her all the time. How much she’d like climbing a mountain in Cashmere or learning the infinite corners and cobblestone back ways of Hong Kong. She’d been so far away, I hadn’t thought of calling her, but there I was in LA. I could call her.
But she’d let me go. She’d been the one to walk away, and she’d dropped off the face of the earth afterward, which was for the best. I was poison for her. I couldn’t call her. Pride, or emotional self-preservation, stopped me.
I got in a cab. There was a magazine on the seat, an arty fashion thing, with Georgana on the cover, wearing makeup no one should be seen out of the house in. I casually flipped through it as the driver got on the 105.
I smiled when I saw Brad’s picture. I could stand to see that nutjob again. He was hamming it up in a grainy black-and-white spread while Arnie tried to run up a wall and Britt kissed Maryetta. The detail in the picture was enthralling, seven stories at once, with the alleyway itself a fully-developed character. I couldn’t look at it without smiling. I kept coming back to it and seeing new things. I moved my thumb to examine some detail in a corner and found the photographer’s credit.