How to End a Love Story(102)
It’s a good airport and she’s glad she specifically requested it. She’s in LA for just two weeks—the studio is covering her expenses and they’ve given her a packed ten-day itinerary of interviews, photo calls with the cast, breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and drinks with people (executives, publicists, actors). She barely has time to think about Grant Shepard at all, and when she does, her thoughts always seem to cluster around the Ivy Papers premiere night (next Wednesday, August 24, seven p.m., the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel) and whether or not he’ll attend.
Helen tries to focus on things like what she’s wearing (Nicole convinces her to work with a stylist), what she wants to say to the room at large (she writes a speech, a short one about gratitude and dreams come true), and what she’ll do with her hair (what would Grant like more? she wonders, then ignores the thought, then decides to wear it down—no, up).
She wonders if he’ll bring someone to the premiere, then viciously reminds herself this is what you wanted for him. She isn’t foolish enough to think someone like Grant Shepard would stay on the market for long (You’re getting me for below market price, at great value, he once told her). If this happens, she will smile and nod and be friendly.
Over the next week and a half, as she’s driving to meetings and walking up to alfresco dining establishments, she has entire conversations in her head with Grant and his fictional date.
It’s so great to meet you, she tells this faceless, effortlessly perfect creature. Grant’s so lucky to have you in his life.
Yes, Grant and I knew each other in high school, she confirms to this woman who definitely exists. No, we didn’t talk much back then. We got to know each other a little better in the room, though. What a funny way to run into someone from your past.
No, I’m not in love with your future husband, she tells this feminine paragon who has the face of Natalie Portman and the charitable nature of Mother Teresa. If you invited me to your wedding, I would totally come.
I’m so happy for you, she tells Grant in her head over and over and over. Me? I’m doing really well, actually.
She never gets the delivery quite right. Maybe she should try something else.
Me? I’m not sure I know how to feel things anymore.
Helen is doing well, though, if anyone asks anyone else. Her New York life has resumed as she once hoped. Going away to Hollywood and returning has made her something of a prodigal friend in her old author circles, and Helen has found it surprisingly easy to revert to an earlier draft of herself.
“We missed you!” Pallavi had exclaimed over their catch-up brunch, as if there had never been any strange distance between them at all. Maybe it had all been in her head.
“It’s nice to have the old Helen back,” Elyse said, when she came over for dinner. “Glad to see you didn’t go all Hollywood on us.”
Helen gazes out a window overlooking Hollywood Boulevard now, on the eighth floor of the historic (and supposedly haunted, her publicist noted conspiratorially) hotel where they’re hosting the Ivy Papers press junket. She mentally maps the familiar streets she’d take to get to Grant’s house from here. She’d drive down that long stretch of boulevard lined with palm trees and billboards, and in just fifteen short minutes, she’d be there.
But then the elevator dings its arrival, the doors open and she heads toward the press junket on the mezzanine floor instead.
Wednesday, August 24, 8:15 p.m.
It’s the night of the premiere and Grant is on his second—maybe third? fuck, who cares—glass of scotch. It’s been four months since that day on the train, and he’s spent every day since telling himself to move the fuck on, that Helen Zhang clearly wants nothing to do with him, that someday he’ll probably see she’s gotten married to some nice, normal guy her parents probably love and Grant will be happy she got what she wanted after all, because he’s healed and moved on too. And every night before he drifts off to sleep, he resolves, I’ll try harder tomorrow.
He thinks maybe he was holding out his last, barely there thread of hope for this night. He’s sitting in his home office, wearing a tailored suit he put on two hours ago with every intention of walking out the door in. He still might.
He had received the emailed invitation to the Ivy Papers premiere party weeks ago and given it a few moments’ consideration before thinking fuck it and RSVP’ing for one. He had watched as that bulleted event on his calendar drew closer and closer—that looming green dot on his iCal was a better jolt of wake up! than caffeine. He watched Helen’s Instagram stories like a shitty montage of self-inflicted misery, from her touchdown at Bob Hope Airport on Sunday to her whirlwind press tour reposts to vague snapshots of meetings and lunches at various Beverly Hills restaurants and rooftops, all in the wrong goddamn direction.
Grant reminds himself this was part of the deal, that they would cut off direct contact once everything ended. The days passed with nothing to contradict this in his inbox.
He couldn’t sleep last night—he blamed it on a third act problem he was having in the new pilot he was breaking. He’d gone into his office, stared at the Scrivener document where he kept all his notes and outline drafts organized, and then suddenly remembered the only reason he even knew about Scrivener in the first place was because of a time he and Helen had been working at a coffee shop together. He’d been tabbing back and forth between an outline in Google Docs and his script in Final Draft and noticed she was using writing software he had never seen before.