“I don’t think my mother knows Adelaide has a stash of letters,” Redwood said, agitated. “Does anyone know? We should know for the movie. Why didn’t she tell us? She really didn’t say anything about what’s in them?”
“They might not be important.”
“Or they could be really important. Shit. Would you be willing to ask her if I could read them? I mean, I can’t help but feel a little hurt she didn’t show them to my mom. What if there’s some huge revelation in them, and she lets the cat out of the bag after the movie’s finished? Would she do that? Could we ask her not to do that?”
“You can ask her whatever you want,” I said.
“But she’s chosen you to confide in. Apparently.”
I shouldn’t have told him anything. His keenness was making me turn away from him, clutching my little nugget of knowledge. Mine, not yours.
I’d figured out how to be Marian—and being Marian mattered to me—but every day we filmed I cared less about the movie. It didn’t matter much to me anymore if it was good. I’d stopped imagining myself and my Oscar. This little flicker of truth, that Marian Graves had met her niece before she disappeared, had undermined everything, cracked through the artifice, like how in cartoons a building’s whole facade might collapse forward, crushing everything except the hero, who is spared by a perfectly aligned window. I felt foolish but liberated, standing there amid the rubble.
“You know the movie’s not true, right?” I said to Redwood.
“People will want it to be true,” he said.
“I don’t know if anyone will really care. People wanted Archangel to be true because they knew it wasn’t. But this is already like a game of telephone. There’s Marian’s real life, and then there’s her book, and then there’s your mom’s book, and then there’s this movie. And so on, and so on.”
“I just want less chaos,” he said. He tapped his temple. “In here. I want to know what’s going on.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I get that.”
* * *
—
“I’m not sure love is something you find,” I’d told the Vanity Fair reporter after she asked me if I was searching for love. “I think love is something you believe.”
“Are you saying love is an illusion?”
“I had a shrink once,” I said, “who told me to imagine a glowing tiger that ate all my doubts. The crazy thing is that it works if you believe it will. But does that mean the tiger is real? Or does it mean my doubts aren’t?”
Then I told her how once I’d been in a cave and hadn’t been able to tell glowworms from stars, and as far as a hatchling fly is concerned, the thing that devours it is a star.
Far out, she said, and I could tell she was going to make me sound like a huge flake.
I said that if you didn’t believe you loved someone, then you didn’t love them.
“Should we just sleep together and see what it’s like?” Redwood said in the hotel bar, still rankled by Adelaide and her letters. His irritation with me was emboldening him; he wanted a sense of order, and he thought sleeping with me might get him that.
“What a delicate dance of seduction,” I said.
“I’m being direct,” he said. “I value directness. I like you. I’m attracted to you. I know you well enough now to feel like I wouldn’t be going to bed with a stranger. Is it wrong to admit I’m also nervous?”
“You mean ambivalent.”
“Are you not ambivalent about me?” he asked. “We both have reasons to be cautious. Neither of us claims to be a romantic. What if we entered into this deliberately, with radical honesty, following an experimental procedure?”
“You’re right. That’s not romantic.”
“But it could yield romantic results. The big-leap thing hasn’t worked for me. I want to try something else.”
The sunset had turned Denali’s summit the pink of strawberry ice cream. Some people at the bar were pretending to take a selfie but really taking a picture of us. I imagined inviting Redwood downstairs with me, going to bed in the fading light, our armor clanking together.
“Maybe,” I said. “But not tonight.” I pointed out the window. “I have Saturday free. Do you want to go see that mountain?”
* * *
—
“Makes you feel pretty small, doesn’t it?” said the pilot through our headsets, talking in his clipped pilot voice over the engines.