The Other Side of Now, page 2
Falling for the hyperclear image myself, I wonder if a little more Botox wouldn’t hurt. It’s such a slippery slope. Once you put it here you need it over there, and suddenly you’re getting injections in your earlobes and don’t know what happened. I talked to someone at a party once who said she got her knees injected after seeing someone on Instagram say that they looked like angry hobbits.
I saw the picture and they weren’t totally wrong, but frankly everyone’s knees look stupid when you stare at them long enough.
“You look good, kid.”
I sigh deeply and give Devon a loaded look. “Thanks.”
He juts his chin and gives me a look back. “I know this isn’t exactly what you had in mind when you made your deal with the Hollywood devil,” Devon says, his voice low. “Hell, it’s not the deal any of us thought we were making. But it worked.”
I nod and say, “Well, I didn’t have a functioning car when I started and now I’m here, so I guess you could say it’s working.”
He considers me for a moment, looking like he has something to say, but isn’t sure he should.
“Just say it, Devon.”
“I do have a bit of unpleasant news. Some words from up top.”
I tilt my head, braced. “What?”
“They want you to lose another”—he drops his voice to a whisper—“ten pounds.”
“What?” I ask again. I heard him. I can’t believe him.
“I know, I know,” he says.
“Devon, are you serious? They already had me drop ten pounds this season. I’ve basically been eating lemon water soup as every meal for three months.”
“It’s the evil twin storyline. I don’t make the rules, baby. I’m sorry.”
“This is insane. Another season and there won’t be any of me left.”
“Actually, hon, the truth is…” He comes closer again, close enough that I can smell his veneers. “I’m not sure there’ll be another season. They’re hoping, so you have to be prepared, but it’s not a sure thing.”
“Wait—what? The show is huge! The ratings are—well, obviously they’re not great but that’s kind of what we are. Bad and everyone likes us.”
“I know.”
“Is it because of that New Yorker article?”
“Shh, shh, you cannot tell anyone else. Not a soul. I’m not telling anyone but you. Don’t worry, I’ve already got some backup plans lined up, and I promise I’ll take you with me wherever I go if we get…” He drops his voice to an inaudible level, basically mouthing, “canceled.”
I stare at him in shock, but then nod slowly and say, “Okay, I guess I’ll … go ahead and lose those ten pounds though, just in case.”
He does a what are you going to do? shrug, not quite getting my ironic tone, then says, “I know a guy over at Love Is Blind, rumor has it they’re looking for a new host. What do you think?”
“I’ve got to go. Let me know if my career is over when you get word.”
I turn on my Louboutin and leave.
After changing and having my fake eyelashes ripped off and my makeup removed for almost an hour, I walk to my ride while checking my phone. As always, I have several missed calls, a few voicemails, almost thirty missed texts, and a flurry of emails. I scan over them.
Hey Lana! Checking in that we’re all good for the Gillian dress tonight? Spoke to Lisa Michele, and she said you weren’t sure if—
Hi, gorgeous! We’ve sent along a FREE collection of our NEWEST and most coveted lip stains. If you could post about it, that would be great! Please be sure to include these in your post—
Lana, circling back after last week’s call. Have you given any more thoughts to a collab? SPOT—The Best Period Underwear. Period.—would love to have you as a spokesperson—
Hi, sorry but Grayson told me to text you and ask if you knew where his Bulgari Octo Roma watch is, he’s supposed to wear it tonight and get a picture—
I feel my blood pressure rise as I look at them. It’s like a self-propagating to-do list every time I open up my phone.
I get into the back of the waiting G-Wagon, handing my phone to Lisa Michele, my personal assistant.
“Oh, ew, there’s so much here. Okay, I’ll forward these on over to myself.” She pokes at the screen, then hands it back. “So annoying that they keep contacting you instead of me.”
I pull down my Dodgers hat so far that I basically can’t see, a signal that I’d like to be left alone.
Lisa Michele doesn’t get it, and starts scrolling through her own phone. Chaotic bursts of noisy video start and stop as she jumps from one clip to the next. It’s one of her worst habits. She looks up my hashtag and then watches all the videos about me.
“This is so great,” she says. “Literally everyone loves you, I’m not even kidding. Like all the old people on Instagram especially for some reason, but also like everyone my age.”
I let my head loll to the right to look at her. She’s an impossibly perky twenty-two-year-old with vocal fry and upspeak, a piña colada vape pen, and a degree in Social Media Management from Northwestern. I’m only eight years older than her, but whenever I listen to anything at all that she says, I feel like the old version of Rose in Titanic.
Not least of all because that is the reference that comes to mind first.
The car jerks as someone cuts into our lane and I grab the bar on the door, gripping so hard I think I might crack one of my Gel-X nails. My heart pounds in my throat.
“Oh, well actually, lies, not everyone loves you,” Lisa Michele says, reacting to her phone screen but not the jerking of the car. “Some of these comments are … real cringe.”
I take a few deep breaths.
To understand my career as it stands, all you need to do is read the six-page think piece written about me and the show I’m on, Brilliance, that was recently published in the New Yorker. The article was called “The Era of Eras Has Ended.”
The writer, who probably lives in a perfectly nice apartment in Brooklyn but still complains about the entitled bourgeoisie, wrote an article about how our times are best reflected in the bewildering, if not troubling, churning of briefly surging cultural fads so intense and so fleeting that they cannot even be gathered into something as amorphic and ephemeral as a zeitgeist.
He went on to say that Brilliance is at its core an unconscious parody of its predecessors and itself.
He’s missing the fact that it’s not unconscious. Brilliance is an over-the-top primetime soap opera made for the streaming era. It’s like Dallas or Dynasty, but intentionally camp. Devon once described it as Succession for the gay community.
The show plotlines include amnesia, resurrections, family secrets, love triangles, and—apparently next season—an evil twin.
An evil, problematically thin twin.
But people have been obsessed with the show. It’s like the world all of a sudden got sick of cool shows, great writing, and nuance. It’s all the drink-throwing and opulence of Real Housewives without the tricky real-world ramifications. It’s all the betrayal and twists you want out of Shakespeare, but without the labor of Elizabethan English.
And I’m the lead villain. Daphne Gwenn, the new-money bitch everyone loves to hate.
The show is a sparkling, champagne-fueled, high-drama shitshow that everyone has watched, even if just to stay in the conversation. But ever since the New Yorker article, the headlines have started to get more critical.
Perhaps in part because of the article that predicted it, the phenomenon of the show must have a time limit. And after what Devon told me, maybe my success does too. I mean Love Is Blind? That’s not even Love Island.
I mean. Of course it can’t last forever. Nothing in Hollywood does. Famously.
My mind reels back to a summer when I was a teenager, the sound of old jazz and the smell of kettle corn.
For a while, she had said. I’d be famous for a while.
Lisa does not stop reading mean comments from internet trolls for the rest of the drive, even once the car is parked in the driveway. I say the driveway because no matter how much I actually live here, it still feels like Grayson’s house. Not ours. Not mine. His, and I live here.
As we climb out of the back seat, she tells me that someone thinks I look like I am my own Madame Tussauds wax figure, and that’s when I lose it.
“Lisa Michele,” I say, rounding on her and raising my voice to a firm, angry-mom level. “My dude. You have got to shut the fuck up.”
She blinks several times, her fresh eyelash extensions flapping. “Wow. That is so not professional.”
“I can’t—” I look beyond her and see that a gardener is filming us, and leave without another word.
* * *
“Okay, okay,” I say, then, “Whoa!” as I almost fall backward off the piano bench. I laugh, so everyone else knows it’s okay to laugh. I kick off my Amina Muaddi slingback pumps, saying loudly to the party fray, “It was the shoes, it was the shoes!”
I run my hand through my hair, which is now no longer neatly parted but raked through and swept to the side.
“Okay,” I go on. “I’m terrible at toasts but I want to thank you all for being here for my thirtieth birthday, and say that I can’t wait to have you all over next year. For my thirtieth birthday.”
I lift my glass once more as everyone laughs at my joke, then down the rest of my champagne. I look around for Grayson but don’t see him anywhere.
Tonight, I am playing the role of the charming, charismatic hostess who is wildly at ease and deeply clever. If this personality were a cocktail, it would be one part Zelda Fitzgerald, one part Serena van der Woodsen, and a few dashes of each character Kate Hudson has ever played. I’m serving it shaken, strained, and straight up.
It’s a persona well-aided by the fact that all I’ve eaten today are some undipped crudités and a pearl spoonful of caviar, having only glanced at the crème fraiche and blinis.
“Happy birthday!” someone yells, and everyone else chimes in.
Another bottle of champagne gets popped and I lift one hand to point with approval at the guy who opened it.
This party was supposed to be outside, under the amber lanterns in the backyard with a big band playing. Usually LA evenings are cooler this time of year, and it never rains, as the song “It Never Rains in Southern California” is there to remind you. Even if that song was actually about the disillusionment of people with dreams in this city, I think of it every rare wet day. Like today, because seemingly out of nowhere, it began to pour. I hadn’t looked at the forecast because we never have to in June. And I guess somehow no one else did either.
The catering crew had scrambled to bring all the bottles and glasses indoors as the rain began. Some guests left, because there are always people who give up the second there’s a location change, even if it’s by twenty yards. Everyone else made their way inside, some covering their hair, others rescuing bottles of wine from the tables.
It’s so warm that I decided to open the accordion window walls that face the yard and then leaned against the column between them to watch the frenzy. Rain-drenched Barry Keoghan lit a cigarette and walked leisurely across the backyard with his shirt mostly unbuttoned, stopping in the middle of the lawn to look up at the sky.
I was still watching him when the party planner came up to me, mortified, clearly worried I was one of those punitive celebrities who would end her career because of a mistake. She didn’t know that I honestly do not fucking care.
So now, instead of a fancy fete on a breezy June night, attended by guests with perfect hair and makeup, my party has devolved into this. The house smells like the sweaty cloud of Le Labo left over after a hot yoga class at One Down Dog. But the heat and the rain have lent a fun comradery to the evening: Women have put their Nine Zero One Salon–done hair into messy buns off their shoulders and the guys have rolled their sleeves up. Everyone’s drinking too much wine, so the vibe is actually better than it probably would have been.
It should be lovely.
Maybe it would be, if I didn’t give up on finding Grayson on the main floor, go upstairs, burst into my own bedroom, and find Grayson there with the costar of his latest Marvel movie.
I don’t even linger. I turn on my heel and leave, knowing he’ll follow me.
I storm to the sunroom, which is on the opposite end of the house from the party. Rain pelts the panes of glass all around us. The humidity reminds me of Florida.
“Can you please admit that you’re sleeping with Elsa?” I snap, as soon as the door is shut. “I don’t even care if you are. I just don’t want you to make an idiot out of me when I’m the last to know.”
“I’m not cheating on you.”
“You are!” I raise my voice. “I know you are! I’m not dumb, Grayson! You’re in the bedroom with her doing what, then? God. I mean, seriously, have a little respect for me.”
“No, Lana. Will you lower your voice?”
“Lower my—no! It’s my birthday and I can have a meltdown if I want to!”
“Lana.”
“Grayson,” I say, in a mocking, schoolyard tone.
“I’m Hitchcock.”
“Ex … cuse me?”
“In Spielberg’s new biopic, I’m going to play Hitchcock! I told you about it, remember?”
I stare at him blankly.
“I’m going to be Alfred Hitchcock. I got the part, babe!”
I blink a few times at the redirect. “What does that have to do with you in our bedroom with Elsa on my birthday?”
“I couldn’t talk about it in front of anyone!”
“So … why wouldn’t you have pulled me into the bedroom?”
He goes red. “Because they haven’t casted the Grace Kelly part yet and I think Elsa would be good for it.”
I roll my eyes at casted and then say, “You don’t think maybe I would be good for it?”
Even saying it embarrasses me. It clearly embarrasses him too. “They’re probably going to go with a big name, anyway. Like Margot or Saoirse or Evan. Maybe Lily. Someone who’s … you know, done more.”
“So if you were going to suggest—ugh, forget it. God.” I shake my head. “How are you going to play Hitchcock?”
I motion at his CrossFit-keto-intermittent-fasting-sculpted body.
“I’ve got a freezer full of Van Leeuwen and a kegerator being delivered on Monday. My trainer has a plan too. Gotta pack on the pounds.” He pats his hard stomach, and it sounds like he’s banging on a marble countertop. “This is it, babe. I’m going to kick my career into hyperdrive.”
One would argue that came when he did the remake of The Outsiders as a teenager, played Sinatra in the Luhrmann Hollywood Canteen movie, or, yeah, when he got the lead role in the newest chapter of the limitless Marvel Cinematic Universe, a film that grossed the most since Avengers: Endgame.
Grayson Gamble is not just famous. He’s nepotism famous. Hollywood royalty famous. His grandmother was in movies with Bing Crosby. His mom was a producer on most of the erotic thrillers of the nineties. His cousin headlined the last Coachella. His whole family tree is hyperlinked.
“I wanna be taken serious, you know? I’m over going to like, Kardashian Christmas parties and doing collabs. I want to be … like … eating dinner at Vespertine with like … Joan Didion.”
I shut my eyes with desperate patience. “Grayson.”
“Is she dead too?”
He says too because he is constantly making this kind of mistake. So many women on this earth would do anything to be with this guy and they have no idea the labor it takes. I am, in fact, simply impressed he even got her name right.
“Yes, Grayson. She’s dead.”
“Why?”
“Why? Do you mean how?”
I’ve confused him. “Well. You know what I mean,” he says, shaking his head like an Etch A Sketch. “Look, this is really important to me. Can you not ruin it?”
I gape at him. “Are you being serious?”
“Yeah?”
I let out a deep breath. “When our agents hooked us up, and we decided to go for it, we swore we’d be honest with each other if something needed to change. We’re supposed to help each other, not make things worse.”
“I didn’t cheat on you.”
I stare at him for a long moment and then say, “Okay. Then I have no choice but to believe you.”
He closes his mouth and nods slowly.
Grayson rejoins the party with ease, and I take to floating around the place like a barely remembered ghost.
The house is full of somebodies and wannabes, delirious from the tidal downpour that has drenched and inflated the heat wave that’s been pulsing outside for the last few days, ending twenty weeks straight of perfect weather. No one here has eaten a carb since 2019, but a bottle of champagne is popped every five minutes because drinking carbs is different.
In the kitchen, someone has produced a bottle of Sotol from some apparently magical town in Mexico and is talking about its aromatics.
On the couch, two people are getting the idea to write a script together, saying, Wait … are we doing this? over and over.
One girl keeps taking ostensibly subtle pictures of the goings-on, but I don’t get the feeling she’s planning to sell them. More likely she’s gotten here by some series of mistakes and is texting them to her mom or best friend with a lot of omgs and skull emojis.
It’s regular, run-of-the-mill Hollywood Hysteria.
I take an unopened Bollinger from an ice bucket, deciding to say fuck it to my caloric allocation and to the former service industry worker inside me who still thinks she needs to be the consummate host at all times.
I go upstairs to hide.
The noise from the party muffles when I close the bedroom door.
My eyes catch on something sparkling on the duvet. I go closer and find that it’s a diamond earring. Not mine.
I arch my eyebrow at the multi-thousand-dollar clue and consider throwing it off the balcony. But my formerly bank-account-always-in-the-negative heart can’t do it. I place it on Grayson’s nightstand.
Asshole.
My black Lab, Dido, stretches as she awakens from a deep sleep in her bed. I go over and collapse onto her, sighing deeply. It’s very melodramatic to say, but sometimes I feel like she’s the only real thing in my life. Dido, with her sad little backstory of abandonment that had been written up on the rescue website alongside several photos of her adolescent, spindly frame. Already not a puppy anymore by the time I found her.
