He was wearing huaraches and drawstring pants in blue-and-white ikat and an orange linen shirt unbuttoned to show a bear-claw necklace nestled in his thick white chest hair. Hugo is tall and impressively burly for someone over seventy and has a sonorous, plummy voice and the world’s most impressive stage pedigree.
He poured us each a tumbler of Scotch. “Cin cin.” We clinked. “Rudy says the internet is burning. He says you set it on fire.”
“It deserved it,” I said, following him into the largest of my living rooms.
He sat on the couch and gestured me imperiously into one of my own chairs. “Oh, I agree.”
I raised my glass. “Thanks for this. It’s really good.”
“Truly exceptional, you mean, and you’re welcome. It wasn’t like I was going to drink it with Rudy. It would be wasted on that palate. Might as well give it to a child. I wanted to be sure you were dulling your pain in style.”
“I’m focusing more on opiates.”
“Please don’t have a meltdown. That would be dreadfully dull of you. And a terrible waste of talent, of course.”
“I was kidding,” I said. “But obviously I’m already in the middle of a meltdown.”
“No, no, no. Jones was the meltdown. Now you’re rebounding.”
“It’s been”—I calculated—“thirty-nine hours.”
“This, my dear, is a golden opportunity to—I hate the word, but in this case it’s apt—reinvent yourself. If you can’t see how you might seize this particular moment, then you have no imagination at all, and I am extremely disappointed in you.”
“I don’t really see how to capitalize on everyone hating me.”
The crazy bitches had tweeted at me that I was a slut, a whore, a cunt. I deserved to die, they said, to be alone forever, to rot in hell. Thank God Oliver was free of me, they said. Men jumped in to tell me I was ugly and unfuckable but also that I deserved to be raped, that I was going to choke to death on their dicks. They didn’t even care about Archangel. They just couldn’t pass up an opportunity to tell a woman that （a） they’d never fuck her and also （b） they were going to fuck her until she died. I’d scrolled. I was hanging in the stocks so the village could come by and jeer at me. I had committed an act of terrorism as far as the crazy bitches were concerned. I had attacked their way of life. The bitches said IN ALL CAPS that they wanted me to suffer, to be obliterated. But really they wanted me to fix it, to undo what I’d done, to return them to the way they were before.
Every once in a while, someone would be like, hey, stay strong, girl, and that was enough to make me tear up. Then someone else would say it was my fault Mitch had overdosed or that my parents were lucky they were dead so they wouldn’t have to be ashamed of me.
“Not everyone hates you,” Hugo said, “just the—what do you call them? The crazy bitches? Most people don’t care at all about Archangel and therefore don’t care at all about you. Don’t look like that—it’s a good thing. The worthwhile people probably think you just got more interesting, showed a little backbone. Not that Oliver isn’t a nice boy, a gorgeous boy, but he’s too vacuous for you. Of course I understand the appeal of the beautiful, vacuous boy. Rudy isn’t what you would call complicated, but, you know, I’m old. I want someone young and frivolous whose most profound and complicated desire is for fun, specifically fun that is purchasable with money. That’s an important distinction. Do you know how few people can actually be made genuinely happy by money? It’s really quite rare. Rudy is what suits me now, but when I was your age I wanted something fraught and epic that could”—he bared his teeth and mimed ripping something in half—“tear me apart.” His famous voice echoed off the ceiling.
I wanted to tell him about Alexei, but Hugo gossips.
I said, “I haven’t heard a peep from Oliver. He hasn’t called to scream at me or anything. Just silence. My agent says his agent says he’s devastated. But he cheated on me with at least one actress and at least one model and God knows who else, and I got over it. This whole heartbroken act is a bit much.”
He waved a hand in dismissal then leveled his most piercing gaze at me and asked, “What drew you to Oliver in the first place?”
“Have you seen Oliver?” Hugo pierced harder. I said, “He was the only one who understood what it was like to live through the whole Archangel thing. You know how people say you should choose someone you’d want to be in a foxhole with? But this was like, what if you’re in a foxhole already, and someone else happens to be in there, too? Then you have the foxhole in common, which is not nothing.” I drained my glass. Hugo went to the kitchen and came back with the bottle.