Lauren lets out a choking little laugh.
“I’m right here,” Gabe says.
This time it’s Elizabeth who reaches out and pats his hand.
“You’re very handsome too,” his mother says.
“So, Ben Walsh…？” I prompt, unable to help myself.
I also kind of like seeing this faux-jealous version of Gabe.
“He’s been sniffing around Lauren ever since she came to visit The Philadelphia Story set,” he says.
“Sniffing around?” she says. “I’m a person, not a lost steak. Don’t be a macho asshole.”
Gabe looks appropriately cowed.
“Sorry,” he says. “It’s just…”
“You don’t like him, I know,” she says. “You’ve made that perfectly clear.”
The humor has been sucked right out of the room. Lauren gets up from the table.
“Excuse me,” she says. “I’m going to go check on Lena.”
Once she’s gone, Elizabeth shoots Gabe a look.
“What?” he asks. “She said she wasn’t interested.”
His mother shakes her head and disappears into the kitchen.
“Benjamin Walsh?” I ask, now whispering for some reason. “Really?”
Gabe sighs. “Yeah.” He runs a hand through his hair. “Let me guess, you loved him in Mighty Kennedy.”
“No, I mean, yes, of course,” I say, because who hadn’t loved Benjamin Walsh in Mighty Kennedy?
Benjamin Walsh is the Irish Hawaiian version of Gabe. At least, Gabe from ten years ago—with all the drinking and carousing included. Handsome, talented, and a modern-day surfer bro. His casting as Mike Connor in The Philadelphia Story had been against type, just like Gabe had been as Bond.
He’s also thirty-two if he’s a day.
Gabe’s sister is over forty.
She has the famous Parker family looks, but not in the way that would disguise her age. She looks like a handsome mother of a teen, not a dewy thirty-something. She’s clearly smart and interesting and funny, but that’s just not how things are done in Hollywood.
Suddenly I have a lot more respect for Benjamin Walsh.
“Of course,” Gabe says, looking wary.
“He’s been texting your sister?”
Gabe nods. “Thinks she’s amazing—which she is—but I know his type.”
“Oh?” I ask.
“Models,” Gabe says. “Young actresses. He was flirting with Lauren when she came to visit, but hooking up with Jeanine the rest of the time.”
Jeanine Watterson was the actress who had played Liz. She was probably twenty-five.
“I know,” Gabe says. “It’s none of my business.”
“I suppose you know better than anyone how us everyday folk need to be protected from the big, bad movie stars,” I say.
“If anyone in this room needs protecting,” Gabe says, “I don’t think it’s you.”
I give him a look. He gives it right back.
We sit there, in the quiet dining room, listening to the muffled sound of conversation coming from upstairs, or the other side of the house. It’s hard to tell. Grandmother. Mother. Daughter.
“Well,” Gabe says. “You do know how to clear a room.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“I think dinner is over,” he says.
“I think you’re right,” I say.
THE JAM—NEWSLETTER
EXPAT
Relationships are like countries. Friendships, families, marriages. Any deep, meaningful relationship tends to form its own customs. Its own language.
I was married for longer than I should have been. The country I founded with my husband was full of inside jokes, of little unseen intimacies, of shared habits. We had our morning routine down pat.
He was always up first. He liked to write in the morning and I liked to sleep in. He’d get up before the sun, head to his office by way of creaky floorboards, and work for hours on his typewriter. That sound—the squeaking of steps, the metallic clink of keys—made its way into my early-morning dreams more often than not. Sometimes it was images of tiny mice hammering away at a tiny ore mine. Sometimes it was my grandfather on a rocking chair he never owned on a porch he never sat on.
We’d eat breakfast together. He’d tell me what he’d written, and I’d tell him the dream it inspired. Once in a while my dreams would make it into his work. A character in a short story, a lithe, innocent young thing （there are always lithe, innocent young things in his fiction）， took mushrooms with the charming professor she admired so much, and hallucinated a row of hedgehogs tap-dancing unevenly.