When I walked out of that club with Jones, I think it was the crazy bitches I wanted to wound. In my drunken grandiosity, I imagined I had the power to bring their worlds crashing down. But like any idiot could have predicted, the bitches weathered the trauma just fine. It was my own sandcastle I was kicking over, of course, stomping it into nice, hard, flat, empty beach.
The tagline for the first film was Love once, love forever. For the fourth film, my last, it was Fall once, fall forever. On the poster, a photoshopped, brooding Oliver and a photoshopped, pouty me were superimposed on a beautiful but ominous digital city, its skyline of gold onion domes dusted with snow. What will be the tagline for the sixth film? The tenth? Die already, for the love of god, die forever?
Gwendolyn keeps writing. There are seven books now. But even before I got fired, Oliver and I were aging faster than our characters. We couldn’t be them forever. Or, I couldn’t keep being Katerina. Everyone knows men don’t get old, at least not in a way that matters. They’re filming the fifth one now. The girl who replaced me is a teenager.
The creepy thing is, Oliver and I had first fucked in a car. But it was after the Kids’ Choice Awards, not a premiere. The first Archangel movie won everything the kids could choose to award it. Has there ever been a bigger lie than I only want you? Or forever? Who was the first person to say that nothing lasts forever? Who was the first to notice that nothing does?
Two
The morning after I went home with Jones, Oliver’s stuff was gone from my house. My bodyguard and assistant said that his bodyguard and assistant had come over in the middle of the night to collect everything after the first pictures showed up online. I’d been home for five minutes when my agent, Siobhan, called to check in and politely inquire what I could possibly have been thinking. In the afternoon she called back to relay a partial list of people who were upset with me. She herself was on it—that was implied, although she didn’t yell at me the way she would have back in the early days, when we were both psyched out of our minds if I landed a commercial for microwaveable pizza dumplings. Last year I made $32 million, and she gets ten percent. When you’re as famous as I am, you’re like an immense, gliding sea creature, an ecosystem of your own, feeding a colony of small fry on whatever’s left over in your teeth.
Alexei Young, Oliver’s agent, whom I’d had sex with twice, secretly, and might still be in love with, told Siobhan that Oliver was heartbroken and devastated, which Siobhan relayed to me. The general entity of The Studio was upset and specifically the head of The Studio, Gavin du Pré, to whom I’ve given one blow job and not because I wanted to. The investors were upset, as was Gwendolyn-the-author-of-the-Archangel-books and also the director who’d done the fourth movie, which was in postproduction, and the guy who was slated to direct the fifth.
“The studio,” Siobhan said, “is concerned that people—the fans—are taking this news very personally. The studio is worried you’ve punctured the romantic illusion. Obviously this whole franchise hinges on this idea of perfect love and the thinking is—”
I interrupted. “It’s really not my fault if people are too stupid to tell the difference between reality and a story.”
“Yes, I agree, in theory, but I do think an argument could be made that we all have a responsibility to protect the brand. I can’t really claim to anyone that you haven’t pulled focus from the movie.”
I didn’t say anything.
She said, “Have you talked to Oliver yet?”
“No. But, by the way, he cheated, too. I told you about that.”
“But it never really leaked. If a tree cheats in the woods and nobody takes its picture…listen, I’m not judging, but you could have been more discreet. Let me rephrase. You couldn’t have been less discreet. This was the PR equivalent of a suicide bombing.” She paused. “Was it just a rogue impulse?”
“Isn’t everything?”
She didn’t say anything.
“You want to know why,” I said. “I don’t know why. Jones is a douche.”
“Don’t say that to anyone in the press. Okay. Look, what’s done is done. Everyone just wants an update, some clue about which way you guys are leaning so we can start to spin things.”
“You mean are Oliver and I getting back together?”
“Yes.”
A guffaw flew from my mouth as though someone had Heimliched it out.
“Okay,” she said. “Well. One last thing. Gwendolyn is upset enough that the studio is getting even more upset on her behalf.”