Let's Pretend, page 9
Afterwards we lay on the lawn and shared a joint while looking at the stars. They blurred in my mind with the hundreds of candles that had glittered in every nook and cranny of the party and the net of lights flung over the valley below. ‘I don’t care that it’s a cheap trick,’ I said drowsily. ‘I still love this city. I’ll take fake enthusiasm over real indifference every time. Give me citrus groves and cobalt skies, and I’ll swallow any candy-coated bullshit you want.’
‘Same,’ said Adam. ‘I can definitely see myself here, with all the trimmings. A wife, a couple of brats, a house in the hills. An Oscar in the crapper. And a really hot pool boy.’ He passed me the joint. ‘Play your cards right, and maybe I’ll give you a real ring the next time.’
I’d just inhaled and nearly passed out thanks to the resultant coughing fit.
‘Hey, take it easy. What’s the worst that could happen?’
Although Adam’s tone was teasing, I was ashamed of the wave of longing that swept over me as, just for a moment, I indulged the fantasy. Wife of a movie star. That’s what a superhero gig would mean for Adam. He would become wealthy in a way that meant personal assistants and multiple homes. And the door that had opened a crack with Hollow Moon would keep on opening for me. Wider and wider.
But … What’s the worst that could happen? ‘I can think of a few things,’ I croaked, wiping my eyes.
‘“If you can’t handle me at my worst, then you don’t deserve me at my best.”’ It was one of Adam’s rare parodies of camp.
‘Damn. Marilyn’s an even more terrible role model than Lord Vanquish.’
‘She still made a good point. Because we’ve already seen each other’s worst.’
Had we, I wondered. I looked down at the half-moon ring. It was lovely, but in truth the fit was a little tight.
‘And we’re still here. Still pals.’ Adam started laughing. ‘Be honest … if we had a kid … and it took after you … would you let it keep the nose?’
A baby. A baby. Childbirth is, obviously, repulsive, and I’ve always been faintly alarmed by children themselves. But for the rich even the indignities of procreation can be avoided: a superhero could afford a surrogate. I tried to picture a child with the Thane nose and Adam’s blue eyes, still wide with innocence. The Momager might like grandchildren, I thought.
I passed back the joint. ‘You’re just winding me up.’
‘Maybe. We’d be in good company, though. Think of tonight’s party – Mr and Mrs Oscar-Bait and their photogenic progeny. You know who I’m talking about.’
‘I’ve heard the rumours,’ I said, though I hadn’t.
‘There are always rumours. About everyone.’
This spoiled my mood a little. I’d visited tinseltattles.com repeatedly in the weeks that followed Nina’s introduction. Whoever ran it – their identity was a subject of much debate among the commentators – seemed to have taken against me in a disconcertingly personal way. I thought of the girl, Zalandra, in the coffee shop. A cunt like you doesn’t deserve any of this.
But Adam continued, dreamily. ‘We’ll install a personal trainer for me, a tennis coach for you. Imagine. We’ll get rich and famous together. Throw outrageous cocktail parties. Grow some babies in the orange groves.’
We blew smoke towards the stars, trailed our toes in the water.
‘As long as there’s a pool,’ I said, my head on his shoulder.
CHAPTER TEN
Superheroes notwithstanding, there was another reason for Adam’s burst of benevolence: he had someone on the side.
It wasn’t his first dalliance, of course. There’d been a waiter in Berlin. A bartender at the Toronto film festival. An ex-castmate during our first trip to NYC. Adam wasn’t coy; he liked telling me about his hook-ups. He’d send a message telling me not to wait up or to make myself scarce (‘SCAT’). The first time, I absented myself in the hotel bar; on another occasion I went to an all-night cinema; once I slept in our hire car. Mostly, though, Adam would disappear for the night and swagger back to our hotel or apartment rental early in the morning, rumpled and smug. ‘Don’t worry, Mum, I used protection,’ he’d say, waving the envelope of an NDA.
I found it hard to tell how risky this behaviour was. Even with the threat of legal action, there are always rumours, as Adam said. The trick is to restrict them to a faint background hum, running at a frequency most people don’t tune into. In my increasingly obsessive scans of the gossip sites, I only found two new discussions of Adam’s sexuality. Maybe he just wasn’t famous enough to attract the gossip-hounds. In which case, I couldn’t understand why I was in their sights – according to which site you believed, I had a drug habit, was mentally unwell or was blackmailing Adam over some unspecified teenage indiscretion. One blind item suggested I’d only got the Hollow Moon part because the casting director had abused me as a child and I’d used this as leverage. Another insinuated I’d been a ‘yacht girl’ (hooker) at Cannes.
Compared to all this, Adam’s boy-toys seemed pretty tame. The new one, however, was different. The day after the party, Adam was away at meetings until late. I came down for breakfast the following morning to find a strange man sitting and smoking in the kitchen. He wasn’t Adam’s usual type, which, as far as I could tell, was slight, fair and twenty-something. This one was older; handsome, obviously, but strongly built, stocky even, his peroxide bleached crop in striking contrast to his inky dark eyes and brows. There were amateur-looking tattoos up his muscular arms.
‘Good morning,’ I said, a little too brightly.
‘Morning,’ he replied after a pause. There was a trace of accent.
‘I’m Lily.’
‘Yeah. I know who you are.’ He continued smoking and staring.
Awkwardly, I set about making coffee. My offer of a cup was declined with a terse head-shake. At last Adam came in, wearing a T-shirt and briefs and whistling ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’. ‘What’s for breakfast? Oh, hi, Lily. I see you’ve met Rafael.’ He ruffled my hair, ending with a tug. ‘Any chance you could kindly piss off for the day?’
So I went window-shopping on Melrose Heights, though I was too distracted to take anything in. Rafael was the name of Mr Bad News, the one Victor had warned me about. I was heading for brunch, lost in various uncomfortable thoughts, when I realised someone was blocking my path to the restaurant. For a moment I thought she was a tourist who had stopped to ask for directions.
But it was the groupie from the coffee shop. Zalandra.
‘Boo,’ she said. And smiled.
‘Wh-what are you doing here?’ This was insane. Had she been following us the whole time? ‘How –?’
In the Californian sunshine, she looked paler than ever, layered in thick dark clothes wholly unsuitable for the heat. A squat dark blot, sweating malice.
‘You and Adam. You’re not so special. Because I know your secret.’
‘Wow.’ I managed a cracked little laugh. ‘Couldn’t you think up something a little less cheesy?’
I moved determinedly on.
‘Don’t you walk away! Don’t you dare.’ She seized me by the arm. Now her face was only an inch from mine. Her eyes were bulging, her cheeks blotched with emotion. ‘You’re going to get what’s coming to you, you know that? You think you’re successful. Safe. You’re not. There’ll be a reckoning. Whenever you least expect it, I’ll be there –’
I shook her off, my heart banging painfully against my ribs. ‘Get away from me, freak.’
Other pedestrians had stopped to stare. Several were filming the confrontation on their phones. I looked around for an escape route, my breaths coming short and fast, but it was a security guard from one of the nearby boutiques who came to my aid. ‘Excuse me, miss, would you like to step inside?’
‘I see through you,’ the girl howled after me as the guard hustled me to safety. ‘I always have. Destroyer –’ A little while afterwards, though, she was trudging stolidly down the street.
Inside the shop, the sales assistants hovered around me, making sympathetic noises, fetching a glass of water, urging me to sit down. I saw my reflection in one of the mirrors: the designer accessories, the moneyed tan. I looked like Someone and that’s why I’d been rescued. Here I was, safely behind the rope again.
Back at Camelot Grove, I let myself into the villa and headed out to the backyard. I could hear voices and laughter.
I paused at the sliding doors to the pool. I knew I was intruding. Adam and Rafael were entangled on the grass amid a clutter of beach towels and magazines.
‘What’s up with you?’ Adam asked as I made my entrance. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
‘Close. One of your fans tried to attack me in the street. She calls herself “Zalandra” and is convinced I’m out to ruin your life. So she’s out to ruin mine.’
‘Ah.’ He grinned. ‘Beware the Wylderbeasts. I thought they were an endangered species these days.’
‘What beasts?’ asked Rafael, frowning.
‘C’mon, Raffo, you remember – it’s what the hardcore Wylderness film fans used to call themselves. All five of them, that is. Still, nice to know one or two are still keepers of the flame.’
‘Adam, this is serious. I first met her in London. Now she’s in LA. She’s a lunatic stalker with time and money on her hands. If she can afford to fly out here to follow you …’
‘That would be immensely flattering if it were true. But it’s not. Listen – no, shut up and listen. The Wylderness movies might not’ve set the world alight, but the original books are still a big deal. The author’s launching the prequel this weekend in LA. It’s basically a fan convention. Hell, her PR even sent me an invite. This Zalandra wannabe will be in town for the book party. Randomly bumping into you was just bad luck.’
‘She was outside that brunch place! Our regular spot, the one I posted about on Instagram.’
‘OK, then stop posting tacky shit that’s basically an invitation to nut jobs.’
I shivered. ‘This isn’t a joke. She said there was going to be a reckoning, that I wasn’t safe. And she told me she “knew our secret”.’
‘C’mon. How likely is that? It was just some line.’ Still, Adam frowned. ‘What did she look like?’
‘Youngish. Piercings, cropped black hair. A bit goth. Fat.’
‘Then you’re fine,’ said Rafael tersely. ‘Nobody listens to girls like that.’
‘He’s right. Poor little Lily-pet, though. I’m sorry you had a scare.’ Finally, Adam got up to pull me into a hug. He was still wet from the pool and oily with sunscreen. It smelled faintly of coconut. ‘Fear not – the Lord Vanquish fans will all be hipster nerds who only want me for my action figures. And, listen, I know what’ll pep you up. The three of us, out on the town tonight. Cocktails at the Sky Bar. It’ll be fun.’
I met Rafael’s eyes. He didn’t look as if this was his idea of fun at all. Quite the opposite. Adam, however, seemed oblivious. He stretched and smiled. ‘Fuck, it’s hot. Who’s up for a mojito?’
While he went off to mix them, Rafael and I stood and looked at each other. The breeze ruffled the palm trees; the pool glistened in the sun.
‘I’m sorry for interrupting,’ I said at last. ‘I was just a bit shaken up.’ I was still feeling faint. You’re going to get what’s coming to you … The words throbbed blackly in my head.
‘Yeah, there’re a lot of crazies out there.’ Rafael picked up a towel and began to dry off his torso. ‘But I guess that’s the price you pay.’
‘For what?’
He laughed shortly and said something under his breath in Spanish. ‘For being seen on Adam’s arm.’
It was a strained evening. For one thing, I kept looking over my shoulder for Zalandra’s baleful form. I couldn’t get her out of my head. There was something increasingly familiar about her and I had a sick, nagging feeling this was because I’d half-glimpsed her in other settings at other times. But our night would have been awkward in any case. Adam was irrepressibly buoyant and – wilfully? – oblivious to the incompatibility of our threesome.
‘I thought you wanted to be careful,’ said Rafael at dinner, when it was pretty clear some serious footsie was going on under the table. ‘It’s fine,’ said Adam. ‘We have our magic charm right here.’ He chinked his glass against mine. Then he ordered another two-hundred-dollar bottle of wine.
In the beginning I’d made some efforts to pay my own way, but Adam had generous impulses and increasingly expensive tastes, and the gesture only seemed to annoy him. It was true he’d made good money over the years. I knew he’d helped his parents with their mortgage and he owned an apartment in a smart modern development in the London Docklands. But the fee for an indie like Tyre would have been modest, his Broadway earnings considerably smaller. Now, of course, he was on track to have real money coming in again, big money, a future.
Rafael made his own contribution to the evening. Quite early on, he made a call and slipped outside shortly afterwards. When he came back, he and Adam disappeared to the toilets and came back with a tell-tale sparkle around their nostrils. It was the first of multiple trips.
I didn’t know what to make of Rafael. His stare was pugnacious and his tattoos were scratchy, but he seemed entirely at home in the overpriced Asian fusion restaurant and fancy bars we went to and was warmly greeted by a couple of fellow diners.
‘So what’s his story?’ I asked Adam, in an interlude when the two of us were alone. ‘How’d you meet?’
‘Health and fitness, baby.’
I remembered our midnight conversation by the pool. ‘He’s a personal trainer?’
‘He’s a VP for a chain of gyms. Fancy ones. For basic blonde bitches like yourself.’
‘Oh.’
‘You thought I picked him up off the streets, didn’t you? Racist. Hey, Raffo,’ he said, as the man himself made his way back to our table, ‘Lily wants to know about your gang-banging past in the slums of Puerto Rico.’
Neither I nor Rafael found this nearly as amusing as Adam did. Sometime later, we had our own tête-à-tête. We were on the rooftop terrace of a bar, and Adam had just told me to move aside, as the light I was standing under made me look haggard. ‘And that,’ he said, ‘is not a good look for me.’
‘Adam treats you like crap,’ Rafael said, as the man in question headed off towards the toilets. Again. ‘You don’t care?’
‘He isn’t being serious. It’s … banter.’
‘Whatever you call it, I wouldn’t take that kind of shit from him. Or anyone.’
I believed him. I didn’t care how fancy his job title was. The man only had to hunch his shoulders to look like the kind of person who’d make you cross to the other side of the street.
Rafael eyed me through his cigarette smoke. ‘Must be paying you good, I guess.’
‘That’s not how it works.’
‘No?’
‘You know, you’re being quite offensive. Adam and I are partners; we have an understanding. The two of us go back a long way.’
‘I know Adam a lot better than you, gringa.’ He didn’t say it boastfully or insinuatingly. He was stating a fact. I’d already got the sense that whatever the two of them had was something more than an occasional hook-up. There were in-jokes. Understandings. A physical ease that comes from more than just sex.
How long had they known each other, I wondered, and how deep did the connection go? Adam the closeted gay man was also Adam the closet romantic and that – in his own words – made him weak.
I glanced over to where Adam was chatting away to some random fan, giddy as a glitter-ball. I turned back to Rafael and lowered my voice. ‘OK, then maybe you should tell him to ease off the nose candy.’
‘He’s a grown man. He makes his own choices.’
‘They’re not doing him much good.’
‘That’s too bad. Because in my opinion, chica, neither are you.’
I flushed. I had a feeling that these ‘chica’s and ‘gringa’s were performative. Rafael was mocking my presumptions about him. I was wrong-footed, again.
I left the two of them together after that. I’d had enough. But once I was back in the villa, I couldn’t sleep. My thoughts kept circling back to Zalandra. How frantically she loved a person who didn’t exist. How much she hated me, who was even more of a mirage.
Adam and I had both been launched by fantasy: me, with a Christmas fairy tale, he with his dystopian fable. And now I was boldly going into space and he was joining a universe of superheroes. Even Tyre was mostly magic realism. I was gripped by the thought that if either of us had been primarily known for realist dramas, we wouldn’t be where we were now. Adam and I had become too familiar with the promise of improbable transformations, the seduction of other worlds.
At some point I got up and decided to get something to eat from the kitchen. My room was round the corner from Adam’s; when I reached the turn, and just as I was about to switch on the lights, I saw Adam at the top of the stairs with Rafael.
They were too absorbed in each other to notice me. In a stumbling tangle, they lurched as one towards Adam’s room, their progress punctuated by muffled laughter. Outside the room, Rafael pushed Adam against the door and bent to kiss his neck. Adam let out a long murmuring sigh. Then he began to kiss him back, messily. Urgently. His hands were on Rafael’s hips and waist, sliding up under his T-shirt. His own shirt was half off. As Adam felt for the doorknob, I watched Rafael unbuckle Adam’s belt and slide his hand against skin. The sigh turned to a groan.
I crept back to my own room. I’d been afraid to move in case they saw me. But I was mesmerised, too. I crawled deep under the bedclothes and hugged a pillow to my chest. Then I slid my hand between my legs.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Over the next few days I tried to be out of the house as much as possible. It wasn’t just about giving Adam and Rafael their space. I heard raised voices more than once, and Adam’s mood swung between sky high and sullen. If there’s anything more uncomfortable than sharing your living space with two people having a lot of hot sex, it’s sharing your living space with two people in the midst of a bad row.
