Lies That Bind Us

But a certain amount of self-loathing was inevitable around our newfound friends. They all had a glow about them, the halo of beauty and prosperity. If Melissa and Simon were the heart of our solar system, Brad was its Mercury—sorry, Marcus, Hermes—shimmering and changeable but fascinating and, in its way, beautiful. My first thought was that Kristen was our Venus—Aphrodite—but with hindsight, she was more a comet: mystifying, spectacular, and rare.

“And what are we?” Marcus had said, indulging me. This was after the only other time we had seen them, at a holiday party in Brad and Kristen’s colossal Buckhead home.

“Minor moons,” I said.

“Or Pluto,” he added, cracking himself up. We were both pretty drunk.

“Discredited,” I agreed.

“Invisible to the naked eye,” he said.

“And named after a cartoon dog,” I added.

“Well, not exactly named after . . . ,” he began, catching himself and rolling his eyes. “God, I’m boring.”

“No, you aren’t,” I said. We were still together then. Just.

“Well, we can’t both be Pluto,” he pronounced. “I called it. You have to be something else. What do you think? Which of the Greek gods was the biggest underachiever?”

He grinned as he said it. He’d had at least three beers and a couple of large shots of whiskey. He didn’t even see my reaction, an involuntary wince like a muscle spasm. But I played along.

“Maybe I’m not a planet at all,” I said. “I think I’m more . . . a black hole.”

“Ooh,” he said, nodding. “That’s good. Sucking everything around you into your own darkness. That’s perfect.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Perfect.”

Anyway, Ares and the comet—they sounded like a band, or the hosts of a New Age radio talk show—arrived on schedule and met Simon and Marcus at the airport. I could picture exactly what that moment was like, Brad and Kristen drawing every eye, movie stars in their shades and casual couture. And I guess they were, one of them at least. Kristen had joined the cast of End Times, the Atlanta-based sci-fi show, in its second season but had quickly moved from being an occasional guest star to being a core character. She played an alien who had survived the apocalyptic war with humanity that had left the world in ruins. I didn’t know why the alien had a British accent, but people loved her. They were on season four now, and she had become the face of the show, so while I’d seen her only once since we met on Crete, she now eyed me from billboards and the sides of buses almost constantly. It was a bit unnerving. The accent was real. She was born and raised in and around London to a white mother and an Asian father and had done some theater and TV there as a child before maturing into the bombshell she was today—light-tan skin and black hair complemented uncannily by ice-blue eyes and the kind of elegant calm that made her ethereal, angelic. Not angelic in the sense of prim or sexless—her TV roles had often been pretty spicy, so watching her as someone I knew, albeit slightly, made me feel like a voyeur—but with that chill, otherworldly strength you sometimes see in medieval paintings. Michael. Gabriel. Angels with flaming swords and eyes to match. She was perfectly cast in End Times: beautiful, sexy in ways that felt deliberately manipulative, and ultimately unreadable. It was no surprise that Hollywood had come calling.

Brad, as I think I said, was in commercial real estate. He found and brokered land for powerhouse companies to open new branches and franchises. That was about all I knew of it. It was very lucrative and meant that he traveled a lot, but it had none of the glamour of his wife’s profession. They had met in London while he was negotiating a deal for an Atlanta-based company, and she had looked him up when she first went to the States. He was, apparently, the only person she knew in the city who wasn’t working on the show. They had only just become a couple when we met them, and her first End Times episode hadn’t yet aired. They married a year later, just as her star—her comet, I should say—was really taking off.

“Good timing,” Marcus had remarked cryptically.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Nothing,” he said. “But I mean, he’s a regular guy, right? Smart, good-looking, and rich, but still a regular guy. He buys and sells land for Wendy’s and Wal-Mart.”

“So?”

“So she’s a star, and she mixes with stars. Gets a lot of attention.”

“You think that he married her because he wouldn’t be able to compete with the Hollywood A-listers who were starting to pay attention to her? That’s pretty cynical.”

“Just honest,” said Marcus, who always was. “I mean, if I were with someone like that, I’d be worried, what with all the fame, the glamour, the celebrities, and fancy parties, you know. That I couldn’t keep her.”

As I said, we were only just still together. I opened my mouth to say something, but I wasn’t sure what it was that I wanted to know or whether I really wanted to know it, so I left it at that.

Simon’s earlier irritability had utterly vanished as the four of them met us at the Minos, and he made a point of tacitly going straight to Melissa and kissing her on the cheek. They muttered privately to each other and hugged, their differences forgotten, and I felt a twinge of envy. Brad hugged me warmly, like he was genuinely pleased to see me, and his smile was wide as a child’s, a happiness at seeing us all that seemed so deep and genuine that I was momentarily thrown. Brad was the driest of the group, the most implacable, and his wit had a fine, cutting edge. Kristen hugged me too, but she said “hiya” first, a word that sounded so comically, stereotypically English and unselfconscious, that for a moment I couldn’t connect her to the ice queen I saw on television. I wondered briefly if I’d had it wrong all this time and this wasn’t actually the same woman at all. Her manner was—I have to say it—nice. Ordinary. Less the comet of my imagined recollection and more a person I had once met. She was still exotically beautiful, still English, as her husband was still rich and handsome, but they were also just people, less glamorous in some ways than Melissa and Simon, younger and less polished. That all made Kristen a better actress than I had thought her, and that slightly mean-spirited compliment made me like her more and myself less.

So, nothing new there . . .

Brad looked older than he had. His auburn hair was cropped very close at the sides, and his forehead was higher than I remembered, but he looked more buff than he had been too, his arms long and muscular. He had blue eyes so bright, I had always assumed he wore colored contacts, though he claimed not to, and they flashed when he cracked wise, which was most of the time. There was something slightly skeletal about his face, like the skin had been pulled tight at the back of his head, so that when he smiled he got a manic look, eyes wide, teeth exposed like little chisels. Kristen’s hair was also short—amazingly so—cut to within a couple of inches all over. It should have made her boyish, but it only showed off those knife-sharp cheekbones, so she looked like the magical princess from some strange Japanese anime. She didn’t pulse like Melissa did, didn’t glow, and you might not notice it at first, but she really was exquisite.

“Oh my God!” said Melissa. “Your hair!”

“I know, right?” she said, ruffling it selfconsciously. “Too butch?”

“No!” said Melissa. “It’s fantastic. Very chic.”

“Makes it easier to deal with wigs. And I get recognized less off set.”

“That must get to be a drag,” I said, not really believing it.

“It’s mostly OK,” said Kristen. “But it’s nice not to feel like public property all the time.”

We had left the beach when Simon phoned from the road and waited for them in the hotel’s airy lobby. Our reconnections done, Brad made a pit stop to the men’s room, and we then climbed back into the Mercedes: Melissa in the front; me, Marcus, and Gretchen in the back; Brad and Kristen in the middle. It was tight, but the AC was cranked up and as soon as we were pulling away, Simon had “1999” blaring away on the stereo again, and everyone was whooping and singing, reveling in being there again.

“Can’t believe he died,” said Kristen, as the song finished. “I was sad about Bowie, but Prince? I couldn’t believe it.”

Marcus nodded. “A piece of my past,” he said. “I remember my mom dancing around to ‘Little Red Corvette,’ and I used to crank Sign o’ the Times all through college, remember?”

“Yeah,” I said, suddenly wistful.

The mood in the car had inverted in seconds, as if Prince’s death had cost us something we hadn’t noticed before.

“We need a new anthem,” said Melissa, scanning the iPhone’s playlist with determined focus. “You guys know any other good millennium songs?”

No one did.

I kept my eyes on the passing scenery to stave off motion sickness. Not that I could see much beyond the blur of color and shape.