“I was born to be a wanderer,” I said, the amplified twin of my voice following a millisecond behind. “I was shaped to the earth like a seabird to a wave.”
* * *
—
That ’shroomy night by the pool, what chain reactions had Redwood and I set off? Not the ones I expected. I’d slept in his bed, but he never even kissed me. He’d said I should just crash here because we were too messed up to go anywhere and some company would be nice. He gave me the choice between his bed and a guest room, and I thought he was giving me the choice between hooking up or not, and I thought I was choosing to hook up. But when I emerged sexily from the bathroom in one of his T-shirts, he was already asleep. Around dawn, I think I woke up, and I think he was spooning me, but that might have been a dream because when I woke up for real, he was in the kitchen making breakfast tacos.
“I think you’re great,” he told me when I left, and kissed me below my ear, and who the fuck knows what that’s supposed to mean.
Maybe the problem was that we hadn’t actually been in a beginning, not starting a chain reaction but still riding out an old one. I was still trying to escape my feelings for Alexei, my guilt about Oliver, hoping Redwood would turn out to be the key that freed me. Maybe he was hoping I was something equally improbable. We think each new romantic prospect, each new lover, is a fresh start, but really we’re just tacking into the wind, each new trajectory determined by the last, plotting a jagged yet unbroken line of reactions through our lives. That was part of the problem: I was always just reacting, always just getting buffeted along, never setting a destination.
After I’d gotten home from Redwood’s, I’d taken a green juice into the office, where Augustina was working on the computer. She always seemed to be getting jerked around by men, so I thought she might have some wisdom.
“What does it mean,” I said, leaning in the doorway, “when you spend the night with a guy in the same bed but nothing happens, and as you’re leaving, he kisses you here”—I tapped my neck—“and says he thinks you’re great?”
She grimaced—she couldn’t help herself—then rearranged her expression into thoughtful neutrality. “He probably thinks you’re great,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said, thumping the doorframe twice, like I was dismissing a taxi. “Thanks.”
“Remember your interview tomorrow,” she called after me.
I got in bed and looked at Alexei’s Instagram, then Alexei’s wife’s, then Oliver’s, then Oliver’s ex-wife’s, then Jones Cohen’s, then basically everyone’s I’d ever slept with. I don’t know what I was looking for. Not the selfies or beaches or children or sandwiches I got. I was laboring away, pulling up a huge heavy net full of red herrings. Maybe I was looking for the answer to what I should be looking for.
I already knew I was going to text this guy Mark by the time I got around to his profile. I’d known him since my Katie McGee days. Once Santa Monica High School’s premier drug dealer, he’d become an entertainment lawyer, handsome and discreet, never romantically attached or possibly just never constrained by his attachments, not very interesting but nevertheless an absolute pillar of self-assurance. I’d turned to him in times of need before. People say fuck buddy like the concept is so edgy and clever, but I thought of Mark more as a human placebo. If I believed he would make me feel better, he did.
No one was staking out my gate anymore. The paparazzi had lost interest. Abandonment stings, even when it means freedom. I sent Augustina home, and Mark glided up the driveway in his BMW and drank the fancy mezcal I poured for him and complimented my Marian haircut and took me to bed in his practiced, luxuriously confident way, and when he moved to leave, I asked him to spend the night.
So, when the writer from Vanity Fair showed up the next morning, Mark was still there, sunning himself on a raft in the pool, as conspicuous as one of those huge flamingo-shaped inflatables I’d seen in everyone’s Instagrams.
The article wouldn’t come out for a few months, but when I saw the writer’s gaze alight on him out the window, I could almost have dictated the eventual lede:
There’s a man in Hadley Baxter’s pool. A gorgeous man, in sunglasses and itty-bitty trunks, floating on a raft. “Just a friend,” she says with a sly smile, leading the way through her Spanish-style home. “We’ve known each other since we were naughty little kids.” In other words, Hadley doesn’t need your pity. Hadley Baxter isn’t back. Hadley Baxter never left.