Before then, I hadn’t decided what I was going to do, if I was going to smooth things over or blow things up, but now I had clarity. I leaned forward. “Whenever someone reads your books or even mentions your books, you know who they picture? Me.”
I didn’t know someone so small could emanate so much anger. It was palpable. Heat and vibration. She was like a space capsule reentering the atmosphere.
“Okay,” the waiter said, swanning up, “an ahi salad and the cheeseburger. No wontons no dressing no bun no fries.” He set down the plates. “Is there anything else I can bring you before you enjoy your lunches?”
“No, thank you.” I gave him my most gracious Star-Being-Gracious smile. When he was gone, I stood up. “This has been a pleasant and professional interaction,” I said to Gwendolyn, “but I’m afraid I really must be going.” She looked up at me, at a loss for how to best communicate her hatred. I dug in my pocket and slapped a flash drive down on the table. “A memento,” I said.
Five
It looks about like what you’d think. We made it on Oliver’s phone, so there’s lots of blurry jostling and shots of nostrils and armpits and double chins, and at one point the phone falls off the bed. Not the best production values in our extended universe. Oliver kept calling time outs during which I would sit there twiddling my thumbs while he got another close-up of his dick all by itself, like he was Hitchcock and his dick was Grace Kelly. I wanted to delete the video as soon as we’d finished, but Oliver wouldn’t let me. “I’m sentimental,” he said. So we both kept copies on USB drives that we locked up, nothing hackable.
“Mutually assured destruction,” I said, though of course it wasn’t.
The night before my lunch with Gwendolyn, I’d watched the video before I made the copy. I may have been a little drunk, and afterward I called Oliver, but he didn’t answer. I thought I should go somewhere, but I couldn’t think of anywhere. I thought I should fuck someone, but the only person I wanted to fuck was Alexei, and that wasn’t happening. “This isn’t who I am,” he’d said when he broke off our stubby little affair. “I don’t do this.”
“Well,” I said, “I can’t help but notice that you do.”
I knew Alexei was a ruthlessly good agent, a shark that only eats money, but he was also a family man. He chose her, his wife, and them, his son and two daughters. I say that like it was some big surprise. We’d only hooked up twice. Once on location in New Zealand and once back in L.A. What did I expect? That he would give up his whole life for me? Sign on for a big scandal? Hitch himself to some girl who hadn’t finished college? Did I even want him to?
“You don’t understand,” Alexei said. “I don’t have the benefit of the doubt. Ever. If this got out—you can’t imagine the shitstorm for me. It would be way worse than if I were white.”
“You’re worried what other people think?” I said.
He looked at me like I’d started speaking in tongues. “Yeah,” he said.
When our thing started, I was filming the second Archangel in New Zealand, which was standing in for Archangel’s less icebound colony, Murjansk. Alexei had come to check on Oliver, but Oliver told him to go enjoy himself instead of hanging around set. Oliver told me I should go, too, since I had the day off. Make the most of it, he said. Alexei suggested we visit a system of caves where you put on a wetsuit and float through on an inner tube, and it’s totally dark except for glowworms. They live on the cave ceilings and walls, and their tails shine like stars and attract flies and mosquitoes as they hatch. The poor bugs think they’re flying into the night sky when really they’re just flapping up to get eaten.
In the dark, my tube bumped against Alexei’s, and I grabbed his cold neoprene arm like one boat tying up to another. The only sounds were dripping and lapping, the glassy rustle of water, us breathing, all of it quietly echoing. The black water reflected a thousand points of wormlight. We rotated slowly. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them, I felt as though I were staring into the heart of the universe. My eyes hurt and my skin was tight across my face from looking so hard.
“Didn’t you feel,” Alexei said later, in the car when we were about to drive back to the hotel, “like being in that cave and being out in space could have been the same thing? Like the difference didn’t really matter?”
I turned to him, excited, worried my excitement would make me seem childlike. But his face reflected back my own enthusiasm, my own self-consciousness about being so thrilled by a tourist trap. （Our wetsuits and tubes and the polo shirts of the employees were all emblazoned with “Worm Cave Adventure!”） Our wormlight filled the car. “Exactly,” I said. “That’s exactly how I felt. It was the sky, even though it wasn’t.”