“This is my granddaughter Kalani,” he said. “She’s only seen the first Archangel movie because the others got too scary, but she has all the Katie McGee DVDs. She loves Katie McGee.”
He waved me inside, and I stepped out of my flip-flops, added them to a pile by the door. The house was small but bright, with walls and ceilings of white-painted planks and beat-up dark ones for the floor. It was the first time I’d been in a room I knew Marian Graves had been in, too. Everywhere else had been sets and standins. There was a toy-strewn living room with a braided rug and a sagging couch facing a big flat-screen TV, and through one door I glimpsed a bathroom and through another a chaotic den of pink and purple, presumably Kalani’s room. Stairs led up through an open hatch, and a landscape painting hung slightly crooked on the wall: sharply angled mountains dense with trees and shadows. I moved to get a closer look.
“Is this…？” I asked.
“It’s by Jamie Graves,” Joey said. “Caleb brought it with him from the mainland. I know it’s worth a lot, and I should sell it or at least get a security system or something, but it’s just kind of always been there. I still feel like it’s Caleb’s and not mine.”
The night before, in a bigger, nicer version of this house some location scout had found, I’d filmed a scene where Marian and Eddie were staying with Caleb and there’s a storm in the night, and Marian betrays Eddie by going to Caleb, and they fuck while Eddie’s pretending to be asleep in the room below. So Actor Caleb and I, wearing little flesh-colored patches on our crotches, had feigned hot, hot passion while a bunch of people stood around holding booms and reflectors and the intimacy coordinator said things like Hadley, would you be comfortable if he had his hands on your waist instead of your hips? Bart had started to make noises about maybe the scene would be better, more authentic, if it showed my breasts, and I’d expected myself to say yes because that’s what I’ve always done, but instead I said, “No one needs to see Marian’s tits, Bart.” And that was the end of it.
Thank god I hadn’t read Adelaide Scott’s box of letters until we were almost done shooting, because now I had to act on two levels: （1） like Marian, in a way that was consistent with everything else we’d shot, and （2） like I didn’t know what I now knew, which was that Eddie had been gay and Marian had been in love with his wife.
In Adelaide’s living room, I’d first set the letters out on the floor like a huge puzzle, and then I read late into the night, fell asleep on her couch. Some had been to Marian, some from her.
It seems an awful snare. I’ve told him I can scarcely imagine ever having one and absolutely not anytime soon, and I thought he understood, but—no, he does understand. It’s that he doesn’t care. He wants me snared.
Please keep writing, even if my replies are as anemic as this one. I’m not myself right now.
The doctor says I am doing well, and I haven’t had a drink in a month. I know that counts for little, but I hope my small success is more than nothing.
I know you and Caleb had history, but I guess you did miss men, after all.
I am writing because it has come to my attention that my late husband, Lloyd Feiffer, allowed your father to suffer a great wrong.
Joey led me into a compact kitchen with plywood cabinets and an old beige refrigerator. “I’m just finishing making Kalani’s lunch,” he said, “and then we can talk. Can I get you anything?” He bent into the fridge. “Water, fruit punch, milk, beer?”
“I love day beers,” I said. It wasn’t really a joke, but he laughed as he handed me a can, cracked one for himself. His laugh seemed to be always bubbling just under the surface. Kalani’s lunch was a compartmentalized plastic plate containing a sandwich cut into triangles, some baby carrots, and a dollop of something purple. Joey gave it to her and led me outside.
The lanai had rattan furniture with faded cushions printed with big green leaves. A ceiling fan turned languidly overhead. Their small and scrubby yard was bounded by a chain-link fence grown over with some kind of vine, and a pink bike with white tires lay on its side beside a child’s playhouse in bleached pink plastic. In the corner a wet suit was draped over a hibiscus shrub. Beyond was a black rock shore, low foamy waves, an immensity of water.
“My wife, by the way, was so sure I was getting pranked that she went to Costco. She said she didn’t want to witness my humiliation.” Joey chuckled, a sort of rumbling warning tremor before an eruption, and plopped onto a love seat. “I hope she makes it back in time to meet you or she’ll never believe me.”