I was in a white, fur-trimmed dress being chased across a snowy plain by a man dressed all in black, carrying a black ax, his face covered with a black knight’s helmet. I stopped running. Below me was a dizzyingly high cliff of blue ice, sheer and deadly. Black waves broke against it, throwing up plumes of white spray. The camera started pulling back and up, revealing that the ax man and I were alone atop an iceberg, and the iceberg was floating in an empty, stormy sea. Close-up on my face as I watched my attacker approach. Cut to black. Fall once, fall forever appeared in white text, faded away, was replaced by the release date. Everyone cheered.
* * *
—
In bed in New Zealand, Alexei had told me about his parents, who were loving and intellectual and performatively stodgy in a dust-ruffle-pipe-smoking-Bush-voter way that he’d come to think of as white-people camouflage and broke his heart because it didn’t even work. He’d talked about the maddening bullshit that came with being black in Hollywood, no matter how stuffy your upbringing: how lonely it was sometimes, how awkward development people could be, how clear it was when they wished there wasn’t a black dude in the room so they wouldn’t have to feel uncomfortable ignoring race or making tokenist suggestions. How everyone assumed he only represented black talent or basketball players. How he still got taken for an assistant even though he was thirty-nine years old and crazy successful. How he still got pulled over so cops could express skepticism about his ownership of a Tesla. Before Oliver got Archangel, Alexei’s boss had told him to cut off his dreads. You want to be taken seriously, you need serious hair, he’d said. Alexei hadn’t done it, though, and now he was a partner and no one ever said anything about his hair except to compliment it too much.
He sidled up sideways during the VIP meet and greet, both of us aiming our words in the same direction like we were driving down a road somewhere.
“I didn’t know you were going to be here,” I said.
“Me neither until two days ago. Oliver’s been after me for a boys’ weekend. I ran out of excuses.”
Oliver thought Alexei didn’t have enough fun, Alexei told me, and had insisted on buying him lap dances and a Patek Philippe watch, insisted on losing fifty thousand bucks at poker, insisted on spraying champagne over the crowd at some club where a famous DJ occasionally pressed a button on his laptop. “I don’t remember signing up for any Entourage reenactment society,” Alexei said. “Am I supposed to have a rage attack in a Porsche now?”
This made me laugh in the faces of the VIPs on approach, some rich-looking parents and two tween girls in alarmingly sexy Katerina outfits. From the other side of the room, Oliver glanced at us. “Excuse me,” Alexei said, pulling back into his shell of professionalism, drifting off toward Oliver.
More little girls showed up, and people in costume, and a lone bearded guy who unpacked a whole esoteric theory about the underlying philosophy of Archangel. I smiled and signed things and posed for photos, but all I could see was Alexei, even when I wasn’t looking at him. Redwood had gone out of my head almost entirely. When I did think of him, it was with tenderness, even nostalgia, as though our affair that hadn’t happened yet was already far in the past. When Alexei came sidling up again, I didn’t look at him, but he filled my horizon like a thunderhead.
Sideways, he said, “Do you want to get a drink after this?”
* * *
—
It’s cool, we were both projecting in the dim light of the secret bar for high rollers and The Famous. It’s chill. We’re friends. And what do friends do? They hang out. They catch up. We each held this fiction in front of us like a shield.
“You won’t leak it, will you?” Alexei said about Oliver dating a teenager. “That’s really the last thing we need right now.”
“Does Gwendolyn know? Is she devastated?”
He rolled his eyes. “She suspects. Oliver’s had to launch a charm offensive.”
“It’ll get out eventually.”
“Not everything does,” he said, looking at me intently. “I hope to god not everything does.”
An enormous sculptural light fixture hung from the ceiling, a ball of blue glass tentacles resembling a sea anemone that cast us in a watery glow.
“No,” I said, “some things are just between two people.”
“But,” he said, “that doesn’t mean those things don’t maybe scare the shit out of people. Maybe people thought they could just have a little fling but then the reality freaked them out.”