Until Dan Mitchell.
The latest addition to the second Bond film, he’d greeted me with a lingering hug and kept trying to get me drunk throughout the interview, which he had insisted take place at the Chateau Marmont, where he was staying. I declined the drinks he offered and the conversation was awkward and stilted. It was clear that he was frustrated, and that frustration boiled over when I declined to go with him up to his hotel room to see “something cool.”
“Look,” he’d said. “Why don’t we cut to the chase? Let’s just go upstairs, and you can blow me. Okay?”
He’d had the temerity to wink when I stared at him in shock.
“It’ll make for a great story, and I can guarantee you that my dick is way bigger than Parker’s.”
I had left immediately, and shed no tears when he was released from the movie a week later due to “scheduling conflicts.” A diplomatic way to say he’d been fired.
At the other end of the plane, I can hear Gabe and Ollie talking. Their voices are low and slightly muffled by the deep, underlying humming of the engines and the wind. They’re talking about work—the upcoming press junket for The Philadelphia Story and something called MOTC.
“Are you going to be all right?” Ollie asks.
“Me? Oh, sure. When am I not all right?”
There’s a long pause.
“You don’t have to worry about me, Ollie.”
I can practically hear Ollie rolling his eyes.
“I’m okay,” Gabe says.
“Are you?”
“I am. Look at me, I’m in a private jet.”
The last time I had flown, I was leaving New York. Leaving Jeremy.
Katie and I had spent the first half of the flight watching the feminist masterpiece Magic Mike XXL on the plane until she fell asleep. I did what I was doing now—staring out the window, looking for the meaning of life in the fast-passing clouds.
I hadn’t found it then and I didn’t think I was going to find it now.
Moving to New York to be with Jeremy had been a mistake. I was fairly certain that going to Montana with Gabe was also a mistake. A different kind of mistake, but a mistake.
If I was smart, I’d never leave California.
Even though I’ve never once in my life been able to fall asleep on an airplane, the private jet manages to lull me into sleep and I don’t wake until I hear the pilot say we’re beginning our initial descent into Cooper, Montana.
The first thing I see once we pass through the clouds is the cathedral. It’s a proper one with a tall, reaching spire and a wide spread.
Cooper is small. The airport is at one end of the town and from this distance the whole place—Gabe’s hometown, the keeper of his childhood adventures—feels like it could fit in my palm.
Whenever I would fly back to L.A. to visit my family, I always felt this relief that I hadn’t known I had been missing. As if I’d become accustomed to breathing out of one lung.
It feels like that now. Like I’d been operating on half-oxygen for who knows how long.
I take a deep breath.
Below me, everything is covered in snow.
I’m glad I borrowed a huge, extremely puffy coat from Katie that I had to strong-arm into my suitcase along with a pair of snow boots she insisted I buy. The world looks brisk and vast and unknown. I shiver, but it’s not just from the imagined cold.
It’s almost like I’m coming home. Not to a place, necessarily, but to a feeling. To a possibility of more.
And that completely and utterly terrifies me.
VANITY FAIR
OLIVER MATTHIAS: He Is What He Is
[excerpt]
By Chani Horowitz
We’re sitting in Oliver Matthias’s backyard and he’s telling me about the first time he fell in love. It’s the perfect setting to hear a love story. It’s fall and the air has just the right amount of crisp in it. We’re sitting on lawn chairs, covered in Pendleton blankets （“a gift from a friend”）， drinking hot apple cider.
Halloween is just around the corner. Halloween is when Oliver first fell in love.
“It’s always been my favorite holiday,” he tells me. “There’s a freedom to it—where everyone gets dressed up and pretends to be someone else and it’s not because you’re hiding or you’re deceiving, it’s because on that day we all seem to acknowledge that it’s good to put on a mask once in a while.”
He takes a long drink of his apple cider. I’m content to let it warm my hands for now, though the rich smell of apples and butter and cinnamon is just as intoxicating as the splash of whisky we added to our mugs before we came outside.